Your Basic Nightmare
by Catty Vancouver
Summary: Giantsized Helmacron relatives show up and send Rachel and Marco back in time to the Revolutionary War. And that was the easy part...NEW UPDATE: No, this story isn't dead!
1. Mom and Dad

A/N: I decided to update the first chapter of this story because I was worried that it was scaring people off from the rest of the story (I like to believe that it gets better). It was a little sad for me to change it though…I wrote the first chapter of this story on the back of a classmate's math homework when I was in the 8th grade. And now I am…uh…older than that. By a lot. My eventual plan is to fix up the whole story (it's amazing how plot points can disappear when it takes you over 8 years to complete a fic), but I want to finish it first.

Also if you are new to the story: the first several chapters of this story are short. They get longer, and the writing style matures as it continues. I love reviews, especially constructive comments on how to improve my story! I have no beta reader after my sister quit on me. Seven years ago.

Enjoy!

-Catty

My name is Rachel.

You know that show, Worst-case Scenario? They have nothing on the situation I was in. My friends and I are fighting alone against an alien attack. We fight the Yeerks: parasitic aliens that crawl into your brain and take control of your body. People that are controlled by Yeerks are called Controllers. They look like people, talk like people, but they have Yeerks controlling them. The Yeerks have already infested thousands of humans, in addition to the alien races they infested before they found out about the great host body opportunities here on Earth.

So what is stopping the Yeerks from taking over the entire planet? That would be me, four of my friends, and one alien teenager. My friends and I are Animorphs, that is, animal morphers. We turn into animals to fight the Yeerks.

I promise it's a lot cooler than it sounds.

Most of the time, I think that being 16 and responsible for the fate of the planet is a major problem.

But right now, I was fighting a different kind of battle.

I glared at her. She glared right back at me. And that's when I knew she was really going to do it.

"Let's see . . ." My home economics teacher said, never taking her eyes off me. "Our next pair will be Rachel and . . ." she paused for climatic effect. She knew she was killing me. Ruining my life. "Marco."

They actually had a stupid little ceremony. They did for all the other "couples" too. But of course, Marco had to humiliate me even more then I already was.

"Hey, Rachel, why didn't you wear white? Oh. . . now I remember," he said with a wicked grin as we were standing in front of the class. Our teacher had stuck a white veil like the kind they have for bachelorette parties on my head.

"You do realize I'm going to kill you for this, you little fungus?" I hissed back at him.

The home ec teacher took that as an "I do." And with that, I was officially "married" to Marco for the next week.

"So, how does it feel . . .Mom?" he said, grinning at the doll sitting in an actual baby carrier. A small pink bow was taped to her forehead to show she was a girl.

"Call me that again and I'll break both your arms." I hissed, only half kidding.

"Aww, but then how will we cuddle at-hey, ow!" he yelped as my foot connected with his knee.

They say teachers don't have favorites, and don't get revenge against their students, but, oh, my home ec teacher had really outdone herself this time. I would have to remember this in the future: do not mess with teachers. Specifically, do not comment on their clothing. Even more specific: do not offer to be their personal shoppers, because apparently, it can be taken the wrong way.

I wondered what had ever possessed me to take this class, and then remembered. Of course! I had thought it would be easy. Bake some cookies. Sew a button on a shirt or two. I had forgotten about Baby Think-It-Through.

Our school had gone about ten steps ahead of the infamous egg assignment. They had gotten actual dolls with computer chips that told if the baby had been neglected. The baby could tell when it was being held, when it was being fed, and when it was being changed. An egg wouldn't be squealing on you to the teacher if you didn't feed it. Baby Think-It-Through would. And the worse thing? You really did have to take it everywhere, or else hire a sitter, because it could start crying at any time. Hide Baby Think-It- Through in a closet so its annoying robotic crying wouldn't bother anyone? Fail the project, which was a big old hunk of our grades.

To take a little of the work load off, and also teach us to work with other people, we had also been assigned spouses.

And my teacher, that horrible, horrible person, had made me "marry" Marco.

Marco is one of my fellow Animorphs. We've been fighting battles together for 3 years now. On a good day, he can be brilliant at strategy and decent in a fight. On a bad day, he is a red ant hill that I accidently stepped on. Sometimes we get along. Sometimes we despise each other. At no time would I consider him an appropriate spouse, even in a pretend setting.

I was never going to live this down.

I slunk back to my seat. We had been assigned to sit with our partners at the two person tables that the home ec room had instead of desks. Marco sat down next to me and draped his arm across my shoulders. I elbowed him in the spleen. We spent the rest of the hour screaming at each other after I let myself get sucked into an argument about what we should name our plastic child.

When the bell rang, I shoved the carrier, diaper bag, and Baby Pain-In-Ass at Marco and hurried out of the room. "Sure, honey, you can take her next hour." He yelled after me, loud enough for anyone and everyone to hear.

I would. If I didn't, no doubt Marco would find some way to give it to me anyway. I could just imagine him bursting into my fifth hour, dumping the "baby" on my desk and saying, "She's got a stinky. Might want to take care of it."

I groaned to myself and slammed my locker shut with a bang that made all the other lockers in my row vibrate.

What had I done to deserve this?


	2. The Purpose of Robotic Infants

"My best friend and my cousin. How sweet."  
  
It was later, in Cassie's barn, and Jake and Cassie were lapping the whole thing up, like I knew they would.  
  
"Sweet? You call this sweet?" Marco cried in mock outrage. This isn't sweet. This is passion. This is intensity. This is-"  
  
"A nightmare." I finished.  
  
Marco didn't miss a beat. "Well, maybe we didn't plan on having children until later, but that's what happens . . ."  
  
"Want to see what happens if I break off your-"  
  
"Oook." Jake interrupted. "Maybe we don't need to hear that."  
  
I know I don't. Tobias said from up in the rafters.  
  
"Don't pay attention, kiddies," Marco said, plopping himself down in my lap. "We all know Rachel wouldn't hurt me."  
  
I shoved Marco off, and he fell and landed on a rake. "Ouch!"  
  
Everyone laughed, except Ax, who looked puzzled.  
  
What is the purpose of these robotic infants? he asked.  
  
"To make us think more about . . .uh . . . doing things that might make us end up with children." Cassie explained.  
  
I see. But isn't reproduction necessary to keep up your population?  
  
"Well, yes. But we shouldn't have kids until we're ready." Cassie was looking a little flustered.  
  
Are your bodies not developed yet?  
  
"No. Most people are by our age."  
  
Then I do not understand.  
  
"That's probably a good thing, Ax-man." Marco said from the bail of hay he was now lounging on. "Humans SHOULD have some secrets, what with all the things Andalites tend to keep hidden."  
  
"Waaahhhhn. Waaahhhhn."  
  
WHAT is THAT? Tobias asked.  
  
"It's crying," Marco looked at the baby carrier. "And it's NOT my turn to take care of it."  
  
I glared at him, but knew he was right. I grabbed the diaper bag and the baby. First I changed its diaper. Naturally, the crying didn't stop. I tried the bottle next. I was careful to line up the metal bits on the bottle with the metal bits in the baby's mouth so it "knew" it was being fed. Finally, the thing stopped crying.  
  
"You know, I think one of my cousins used to have one of those." Cassie said. "Amazing Amy or Amazing Ally, or something like that."  
  
"I bet theirs didn't keep track of neglect time." Marco said.  
  
"And I bet your cousin didn't have to work with Marco."  
  
"Hey, not everyone gets that kind of honor."  
  
"HONOR?"  
  
Just as Marco was explaining to me exactly WHY it was such an honor to be paired with him, it happened.  
  
A loud roaring noise, like . . . well, like a spaceship taking off.  
  
Or landing.  
  
Marco had his hands over his ears. "What is that?" he yelled.  
  
Jake shrugged, and then ran out of the barn. Everyone but Ax followed him. Ax started to morph to human.  
  
A redheaded girl was standing a couple of yards away, her large green eyes opened wide in shock. She had a kitty carrier in one hand, and a neon green shoulder bag draped over her shoulder. Her long hair was blowing every which way.  
  
When I stepped closer to where I thought the sound was coming from, I felt a wave of heat rush at me. Since I couldn't step any closer, I reached out a hand to see if I could feel anything. The skin on my hand turned red and blistered. I yelled and yanked my hand back.  
  
"It's like an invisible spaceship!" Cassie yelled.  
  
"Hologram!"  
  
"Who the hell is that?"  
  
The roar was deafening now. I could see Marco was yelling something, but I couldn't hear a word of it. I felt something warm and wet trickling down my neck. My ears were bleeding. My eardrums must have burst. The pain was incredible, but not my biggest problem. When I morphed, my hand and ears would be back to normal.  
  
I wasn't just hearing the roar now, though. I could feel a giant wind force pushing me back, until finally I was literally blown off my feet. I flew back and into Marco. We were both blown back until he hit the barn wall. I was pinning him against it.  
  
The hologram hiding the ship flickered, then disappeared.  
  
"Holy shit." Marco said. This time I heard him, because, ironically, now I was more or less sitting on his lap.  
  
The space ship was house shaped. It was about the height of a three-story house, but somehow it looked like someone had forgot to put in the second and third floors, so it was basically just a house with a very high roof.  
  
There was a front door to the house. It actually looked like a real front door you might find on a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Except one thing.  
  
It was about ten feet tall. 


	3. The REALLY Bad Day

Disclaimer that should have been mentioned earlier: Amora owns nothing of Animorphs other then characters and species she creates, so don't sue her, as she recently blew all her money on new clothes anyway!  
  
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
Hey, everybody, thanks for the reviews I've gotten, I really appreciate it. Sorry this next chapter is so short.  
  
A la Queen Isabella-yeah, I meant to put it into paragraphs, but my computer, for some reason * shakes fist angrily at aforementioned object * didn't do it the way it did with the first story I uploaded. And interesting name . . . if I remember my Spanish, a la means "to the", right?  
  
Prue Halliwell-yeah, I know, I too was paired with a guy (personality wise) eerily similar to Marco for a similar project . . . no picnic, I assure you  
  
Oedipal Kat-don't worry, she's not a new Animorph, I hate stories that just stick in new Animorphs (probably secretly based on themselves). Oh, wait . . . I have a story with a new Animorphs. Oh, well. At least mine follows the plotline.  
  
Jctigerwolf something and Alikat-yep, don't teachers stink? Like a robotic baby (or an egg of all things) could compare with an actual kid.  
  
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
  
  
  
  
~Cassie~  
  
The door opened. The REALLY tall door. The REALLY tall door on the REALLY weird spaceship that had just landed in my backyard.  
  
It was a REALLY bad situation.  
  
And it was about to get REALLY worse.  
  
The wind that had been pushing me against the barn wall was gone. Ax came out of the barn, human.  
  
The door opened.  
  
And out stepped . . .it.  
  
It was tall, which I had expected from the door, but it was still a shock. It was maybe eight or nine feet tall, which doesn't really sound like much, but imagine a basketball hoop. Its head would have been about even with the very top of the backboard.  
  
It had about four or five legs. Its head was triangle shaped and had two eyes sitting on the very top, looking like they were going to roll off. All of it was a shocking purple, except the little jumpsuit it was wearing, which was a slightly lighter shade of purple.  
  
It looked like a Helmacron. Blown up about 100,000 times.  
  
What's a Helmacron? It's an annoying little runt of an alien, hardly bigger then a period, but 100% ego. As Rachel would put it, these things could make a combination of Marco, Visser Three, and that American Idol guy, Simon Something, look humble.  
  
"Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" Jake said.  
  
If you're seeing a rather unattractive midget species, then the answer would have to be yes.  
  
We all stared at the alien in shock. Then, Marco laughed. It actually took me a minute to find Marco, until I realized he was pinned underneath Rachel.  
  
Then it just turned into a staring contest. We stared at it. It stared at us.  
  
Very well, the alien said finally. I see this species-humans, I believe you are called-has no sense of humor.  
  
What a disappointment, Said another, following the first out of the spaceship. This one's shirt had writing on it. In English, no less. When I squinted, I could read what it said:  
  
"I'm with stupid."  
  
Even then, it didn't really dawn on me. Not until Rachel exclaimed, with an absolutely horrified expression on her face: "It's an entire species of Marco's!"  
  
The alien looked down at her superiorly. We are CALLED the Helmets.  
  
"The HELMETS?" Marco said, his voice still slightly muffled by Rachel. "Sounds like a garage band. And by the way, is anyone else noticing the slight resemblance between these guys and our old friends the Helmacrons?"  
  
The Helmacrons? The first alien said, looking slightly interested. Yes, we are distantly related to a species by this name. Have you encountered them?  
  
"Andalites!"  
  
I had forgotten about the redheaded girl.  
  
"Will someone please wake me up?" Rachel moaned. 


	4. Uhoh

~Marco~  
  
"Will someone please wake me up?"  
  
Rachel was still sitting on me when she said this. I pinched her.  
  
"Ahh! You little pervert! You ever touch my ass again and I'll.I'll."  
  
"You COULD have gotten off of me."  
  
In the blink of an eye, Rachel's hands were around my neck and squeezing. "J. . .Jay . . . Jake!" I rasped.  
  
"Let him go, Rachel." Jake said distractedly. He was watching the redheaded girl, who, at the current moment, was jumping up and down in glee, pointing at us and yelling "Andalites! Andalites!"  
  
Yes, I am aware that my life tends to get a little insane.  
  
The Helmets were watching this all with mild amusement. They do seem to be quite an unusual species. The one that had first stepped out of their strange looking spaceship said, as if he were commenting on the weather. I wonder how they ever managed to obtain something like the power source.  
  
The power . . .uh-oh. Tobias sighed.  
  
See, the reason we had run into the Helmacrons was because they had come here looking for our blue box. The blue box that is the key to morphing. The blue box that there was no way we were going to let them have.  
  
I guess the blue box gives off a lot of energy. The Helmacrons wanted to use that energy as a sort of battery for their toy-sized spaceships. They had come here twice, and with each visit gotten more and more annoying.  
  
And deadly.  
  
So far, the only thing the Helmets seemed to have in common with their relatives was their looks. This was a good thing. They also seemed to be missing the Helmacrons' shrink ray, which I guess made sense. It wouldn't do them much good to shrink us down to dust particle size. Who knew, maybe they would make us taller. I could hope, at least.  
  
"Look, we cannot let you have the blue bo-I mean, power source," Jake was patiently explaining.  
  
The redhead girl had gotten tired of jumping, I guess, and was now rushing at Rachel, who was now standing next to me. She hit Rachel shoulder first, like one of the Green Bay Packers at their best.  
  
Rachel moved maybe a fraction of an inch. She looked down at the girl, who was obviously a Controller, the way someone might look at a particularly small, but ferocious, dog. Annoyance mixed with a very tiny amount of pity.  
  
You WILL be giving us the power source.  
  
"Andalites! Andalites!"  
  
"Waaaahhhn. Waaaahhhhn."  
  
"Aaaauugghh!" Rachel exclaimed. "One, you are NOT getting the blue box. Two, we are NOT Andalites. Three, Marco, if you do not take care of robo- baby right now, I WILL kick your sorry ass."  
  
"Only if I get to pinch yours-"  
  
The Helmet pointed something that looked like a ray gun at Rachel and me. Rachel was too busy screaming at me to notice. I shoved the girl out of the way, then tried to push Rachel, too, but she grabbed my arm.  
  
"Don't you dare try to push me, you puny miserable little runt-"  
  
The Helmet squeezed the trigger. A light flashed.  
  
The, suddenly, it was night.  
  
"And it will not be pretty, do you hear me? NOT PRE-oh."  
  
Rachel stopped in the middle of her ranting. "Um . . .where are we?"  
  
It must have been late at night, because it was almost pitch black. Really pitch black, no streetlights, no cars, nothing. The moon was shining, and the stars as well, but it wasn't much.  
  
I could still see houses, though. They were kind of old fashioned, none of them with plastic sidings, and all wood, no light blue, yellow, white, or any of the other colors you usually see houses.  
  
I had the distinct feeling we were standing in the middle of a road. It wasn't paved, and compared to what dirt roads I'd seen, this one was in the bottom three.  
  
A dude on a horse rode up to us. He was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, like maybe he was a reenactor of some war or something. I saw a Civil War reenactment once, and it was pretty cool.  
  
"Be prepared!" He called to us. "The British are coming!"  
  
"Did he just say . . ."  
  
"Uh-oh." 


	5. Unsuspected Motives

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Yippee! * Does dance around computer* I actually have quite a few reviews (ok, yeah, I am aware that lots of other stories have lots more reviews then me-I've seen some with those in the hundreds--but I can be happy over 14 if I want to!)  
  
Jinako-chan-I added more robo-baby just for you (and also "borrowed" your description. . .you don't mind, do you?)  
  
Alikat-Yes, the Helmets are a rather. . .silly species. The story behind the "I'm with stupid" T-shirt is, I needed a joke that didn't refer to human culture whatsoever. Calling someone stupid is, hopefully, universal (  
  
Julie-Thanks!  
  
Black Opal-You * tear of happiness * think I got everyone "perfect"? Thank you, thank you, and thank you! I try so hard to keep them in character.  
  
Freak Apple-Twisting an ear, huh? I was thinking of twisting something that might (from what I've heard, at least) be a little more painful, but I'll keep the ear in mind. I might be able to use that in real life . . .  
  
Jctigerwolf-Yes, I just love those cliffhangers (  
  
Super Hurricane-Yes, I am aware that sending the Animorphs back in time would have no cause whatsoever on the present, seeing as if they are there, that means they WERE there. I read Megamorphs 2, and understood it better then a lot of people. You'd be surprised by the number of people that didn't get that if the Animorphs hadn't been there to piss of the Nesk and make them drop their bomb, humans would have never existed. But, I have also seen Back to the Future, so I figure however I decide to portray time travel is up to me, thank you very much. But moving on, the first paragraphs were non descriptive because I figure anyone reading this has an idea of what Animorphs is, and if they don't, not my problem, they can still get the basic idea of the story. And, lastly, why the hell would Rachel steal the soul of a robot? Robots don't have souls. . . ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
~Cassie~  
  
There was a flash.  
  
Then Rachel and Marco were gone.  
  
WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER-I mean, them?! Tobias exclaimed.  
  
The Helmet with the gun-like thing looked up in the tree. Did that creature just talk? I was under the impression humans were the only species capable of speech on this planet.  
  
"What. . .where are they?" Jake looked at Ax and gave a discreet nod. Ax began demorphing to Andalite.  
  
The Helmet peered at something on the handle of the gun. Oh, they're fine. They've simply been sent back in time approximately . . .two hundred and thirty of your years.  
  
"WHY would you do that?" I blurted out.  
  
The Helmet waved its arm, which I assumed was an alien form of shrugging shoulders. It's a way of temporarily removing them from our presence.  
  
"Temporarily?" I said, breathing a sigh of relief. "You can bring them back?"  
  
Of course, as soon they have witnessed enough battle. Then we will buy their memories to be sold to the Iskoort.  
  
"WHAT?!"  
  
Well, what did you THINK we were doing on this planet? The Helmet said. Enjoying the scenery?  
  
"Trying to steal our blue box?"  
  
Oh, dear me, no, He/she laughed airily. The Helmacrons told us you might let us power up our ship, that's all we wanted. We don't need to STEAL it. The Helmets are a much more honest species then that.  
  
Correct me if I am wrong, Ax said. You travel from planet to planet, sending them back in time, in hopes they will acquire interesting memories, then buy their memories from them. Then you sell these memories to the Iskoort?  
  
Well, yes. You can find plenty of species that sell their memories quite cheaply, while the Iskoort pay much more for them. But, you see, we don't just send them back and hope they stumble upon something interesting. We make sure we send them to significant times and places in the planets history, preferably battles.  
  
"Oh."  
  
"And where did you send Rachel and Marco?" Jake asked, looking worried at the fact that his cousin and best friend were, according to these Helmets, at some battle in history, but relieved that they were planning on bringing them back-alive.  
  
The Helmet once again consulted the gun, which, I guess, would really be called a time machine. The date is April 18,1775. The place is Lexington, Massachusetts.  
  
I knew that name. "Lexington and Concord?"  
  
Oh, no, Tobias moaned. They sent them to the Revolutionary War. April 18th, that's the night of Paul Revere's ride. The first battle of the war happens the next day.  
  
"MARCO and RACHEL?" Jake exclaimed. "At the Revolutionary War?!"  
  
A scary little image of a battlefield exploding, British soldiers in red uniforms flying everywhere, and Rachel cackling in the background, entered my head, but I tried to push it away. Marco was there with her. He wouldn't let anything like that happen.  
  
The image came back, this time with Marco sitting off to the side, bound and gagged.  
  
"This could be bad," I said unnecessarily. No doubt Jake and Tobias were having similar thoughts.  
  
The Helmets looked ecstatic. You think they will acquire interesting memories?  
  
That's the understatement of the year, Tobias muttered.  
  
The redhaired girl had been quiet ever since Marco and Rachel had disappeared, but now she grabbed my arm and said, looking scared, "Cassie? What's going on?"  
  
I stared at her. "How do you know my name?"  
  
She looked a little disappointed. "You don't remember me? Well, I guess I DO look different now, and it has been awhile. And I couldn't remember what it was you guys called yourselves, so I just said Andalites, but."  
  
Now Jake was staring at her, too. "Who ARE you?"  
  
"Are you sure you don't remember me?" She shook her head, and sighed. "It's me. Karen." 


	6. Welcome to the 1700's

~Marco~  
  
"Was that. . ."  
  
"Yep."  
  
"So we're. . ."  
  
"Yep."  
  
"This is bad."  
  
"Yep."  
  
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans, looking for anything that would be of use here. My fingers closed around a box of Certs. In my other pocket, I had a five dollar bill and keys, neither of which would be any help. Luckily, Rachel and I had not been in our morphing outfits, so we were both wearing normal clothes. Well, normal for our time. Here, in what must have been about 1775, I was pretty sure they would not appreciate Rachel's flowered mini dress and knee-high boots, and my baggy jeans and sweater.  
  
"What have you got in you purse?" I asked Rachel.  
  
She glared at me. "None of your business."  
  
"Yeesh, Rachel, I just wanted to know if you have anything useful. I mean, you take everything so personally, what could possibly be in there that you wouldn't want me-Oh!" I exclaimed, finally getting it. "Oh, ew! I did not need to. . .EW!"  
  
Rachel kicked me. "Just find a way to get us out of here." She growled. "My boots are getting muddy."  
  
"What am I supposed to do?"  
  
"I don't know," Rachel tapped her mud-free boots impatiently. "You're supposed to be the smart one."  
  
"Me?"  
  
"Yeah. You do all the boring thinking stuff, and I do the fighting."  
  
"Boring?"  
  
"Well, what do you call it?"  
  
"Thrilling? Exhilarating? Excit-yeah, you're right, it's boring."  
  
Rachel sort of smirked.  
  
"We know where we are," I said, trying to sound smart, now that I realized Rachel must not be the only one with that opinion. "We even know how we got here."  
  
"We just don't know how to get back," Rachel finished.  
  
"Yeah. And if that guy WAS Paul Revere, like I think it was, then we're probably somewhere near Lexington, or Concord, which means-"  
  
"Which means," Rachel said with her classic smile, the one I've come to call the "let's-do-it-butt-kicking" smile. "War is about to break out."  
  
"Rachel, we cannot get involved in that war."  
  
"Who said anything about getting involved?" she said, this time with a "lay off, pal, girls gotta have some fun" smile. "Now come on, I'm hungry."  
  
"And where are you planning on. . ." I shrugged and followed her to the nearest house.  
  
Rachel straightened her hair, which wasn't messed up, and tried to lengthen her skirt, which didn't work too well, then knocked on the door.  
  
"I don't think these people are going to appreciate two weirdly dressed kids showing up at their doorstep in the middle of the night."  
  
The door opened.  
  
A middle-aged woman in a long white nightgown and a white nightcap holding a candle stared out at us. "Have you more news on the British?" she asked with a faint British accent.  
  
"Well, um, you see, we're lost, and hungry, and it's cold. . ."  
  
The lady eyed warily. She searched the two of us up and down with her sharp looking eyes. "Very well," she finally said, opening the door further and letting us in.  
  
We followed her into the kitchen of the house. She got out the end of a loaf of homemade bread, and sort of tossed it at us. Rachel caught it. "Sorry it's a bit stale," she said, taking out and pouring us glasses of milk. "Tomorrow we'll bake new. You can help." She added to Rachel, making sure we knew if we were going to stay, we were going to work.  
  
"Wherever did you get those clothes?" she said.  
  
Rachel, with a look of absolute horror on her face, acted as though she hadn't heard the question. "Bake. . .bread?" she said, as if it were a thought too horrible to even consider.  
  
The woman and I both stared at her.  
  
I had a feeling it was not going to be easy to introduce Rachel to the 18th century. 


	7. Just Go!

Hi everybody, sorry it took so long for this chapter. But I've really been thinking about it, and I could use some advice.  
  
Originally, I planned on sending Marco and Rachel back to the Revolutionary War, and Jake and Cassie to the Middle Ages, but now I'm leaning towards having Marco and Rachel as the only ones sent in time, and doing something else with the other characters, because I want to focus more on Marco and Rachel. What do you all think? ~Amora  
  
~Rachel~  
  
Marco explained to me about the bread.  
  
The woman-Mrs. Campbell, she said-took me up stairs to sleep with her daughters. Marco got the couch.  
  
The girls were more then a little curious.  
  
"Is it true there's a young man down there?" a girl about my age with long brown hair and flushed cheeks asked.  
  
"No." I said. "Just a dog."  
  
They didn't get it.  
  
Rebecca, the girl with brown hair, gave me along white nightgown and some kind of white hat. I put it on, just to humor them.  
  
All the other Campbell girls were younger. One little one with blonde curls looked about 5, a taller blonde maybe 11, and another brunette that might have been 8 or 9.  
  
When I was done changing, I headed for the door. "I need to go talk to Marco," I said slowly.  
  
"Your dog?" Rebecca asked.  
  
I sighed. "No, my-" I tried not to choke on the word. "Friend."  
  
"Not your beau?" She said with a smug little smile. "My WHAT?"  
  
"You know, beau. Your admirer."  
  
"You mean BOYFRIEND?" I gasped. "Marco? No, no, no! And NO!"  
  
Rebecca jumped back from me. The little five-year-old hid behind one of her sisters and whimpered.  
  
"Oh, uh, sorry, I didn't mean to-I'll be right back."  
  
Marco may not have been my first choice, but I needed someone-anyone!- that knew what a supermarket was.  
  
He was asleep already. "Marco!" I hissed, poking him. He turned over, but didn't wake up. "Marco!" I grabbed a hunk of his hair and pulled.  
  
"Aaah! Hey! Rachel, what are you doing down here? I don't think there's room for both of us on this couch-"  
  
"Oh, shut up," I muttered, kicking the couch for good measure. "You are such a dick."  
  
"Me? I'm hurt."  
  
"You're lucky I'm not in the mood to hurt more then your feelings."  
  
Marco raised his eyebrows. "Is that why you're down here? To verbally bash me? Or. . ." he smiled knowingly.  
  
I glared at him. I seemed to be doing that a lot lately. Why not freak him out a bit? "I think you know why I'm here." I whispered, leaning towards him.  
  
Marco rolled his eyes. "Don't tempt me."  
  
I jerked back in surprise. What was that supposed to mean?  
  
Seeing the look that must have been on my face, Marco, looking exasperated, said "I was KIDDING, Rachel."  
  
I relaxed. I should have known it was another of his stupid jokes.  
  
"Are you going to let me go back to sleep now?"  
  
"That's what you want? To go back to sleep?" I exclaimed, feeling a little hysterical. "What are we supposed to do, stay here living on stale bread and catching LICE from these people?" I waved the white cap in my hand for emphasis.  
  
"One, coming here was your idea. Two, if you have an idea on how to get back to our time, I'd be happy to hear it."  
  
I stayed quiet. How annoying of him to cancel out my complaining with logic.  
  
"Of course, if you prefer, we can go live on the streets. These war guys must be pretty lonely, I'm sure you could probably make a few dollars. . ."  
  
"You bastard!" I yelled. "How can you say something like that? You stupid, annoying, son of a-"  
  
"OK! You're right!"  
  
My jaw dropped. "Uh, what?"  
  
"You're right, ok?" Marco said. "I'm an insignificant, annoying little runt, and nobody likes me. It's an absolute nightmare that you could have gotten paired with me for a stupid class project, and then sent back in time with me. Now can you please go away?"  
  
"Marco, I-"  
  
"Go!"  
  
I left, probably the first time I ever listened to Marco. But even though I knew that his one little remark had probably been the worst insult he had ever said to me, I still felt bad about everything I had said to him in the past day. 


	8. A Cooking Lesson, or Watch Out For that ...

OK, people, this chapter is a perfect example of why you should ALWAYS write down your plot. Why? Well, me, being the brilliant little genius I am, totally forgot what I was planning on doing with Karen. So now there's probably going to be a whole bunch of Marco/Rachel chapters until I remember why and can write one about the rest of them. . .I wasn't really planning on doing anything with the bread thing, but everyone else seemed to love the image so much, I figured I'd write about it a bit. . .fear not, more bread to come, since I found out that back then they let the dough rise overnight.  
  
Oh, and Jinako-chan, I swear you must have some kind of psychic bond with the writing section of my brain. . .how else could you guess my plots?? ~Amora  
  
~Rachel~  
  
"Er-er-er!"  
  
You know those old cartoon-like movies where it always shows a rooster, crowing to the morning and perfectly silhouetted by the rising sun?  
  
Uh. . .no.  
  
Despite the fact that the inside of the Campbell's house didn't look they were the Beverly Hillbillies, they actually lived on a farm. And they had a rooster.  
  
Yes, had. After an unfortunate incident with a frying pan, our dear friend is no longer with us.  
  
I wouldn't be either, if Mrs. Campbell knew how her frying pan came to be flying through the air in the direction of the wretched beast.  
  
She was a tough woman. Despite the fact that she may have LOOKED all frail and middle aged, the truth was she reminded me more of Buffy the Vampire Slayer then Ma Ingalls.  
  
Anyway, after she discovered the curious death of her rooster, she borrowed a new one from a neighbor until she could buy another. I could see why the neighbor hadn't been too sad to see this one go. It seemed to have something wrong with its internal time clock, and was crowing every hour.  
  
Grr.  
  
This time, I couldn't even sneak off and do away with the replacement. Turns out, Mrs. Campbell was serious about me helping bake bread.  
  
Rebecca and her eleven-year-old sister, Mary, had cornered me. I was already in a really bad mood. Last night was still on my mind, I was wearing one of Rebecca's extremely uncomfortable and incredibly long and poofy dresses, and my hair had been brushed, pulled, and finally braided so tight I could practically hear my scalp screaming in agony. So all in all, I was really not in the mood to get covered in flour while trying to bake some nasty old bread.  
  
Unfortunately, I didn't have much of a choice. When I calmly explained to Rebecca that not only did I not know how to bake bread, but I was not interested in learning, Mrs. Campbell looked up from her mending. As un- terrifying as this may sound, I knew the look said "Bake or Else". I could just imagine what Marco would say if I got us kicked out.  
  
So I baked bread.  
  
"I just. . .stick my hands in?" I asked Rebecca warily, looking into the bowl of mush in front of me.  
  
"Like this." Rebecca reached in, grabbed the blob in her bowl, and started rolling it in flour. Then she started kneading it, pushing and pounding at it with her knuckles.  
  
I dreaded the moment when she said "Your turn."  
  
I gingerly took out half the mush. Somehow my dough had turned out a lot more soupy then Rebecca and her sister's. I hoped rolling it in flour would firm it up a bit.  
  
I dropped my mush into a pile of flour. I guess I dropped it from a little too high up, because it landed with a soft thud, and clouds of floor puffed up underneath it, covering me in white.  
  
Four went up my nose and in my mouth. I sneezed, and even more flew. I could feel it, stuck to my face, and clinging to my eyelashes. Mary was trying to cover her laughter in a ladylike way, but only succeeded in snorting. Rebecca didn't laugh, but she did take my hunk of dough from me, and handed me hers instead. Feeling a little relieved, I kneaded the dough, imitating the way I had seen them do it. It was surprisingly comforting.  
  
When the dough had been kneaded, it was put into pans and covered with cloths. I didn't know why. Rebecca said it was so the dough could rise, which gave me a mental image of the dough rising out of a grave. Night of the Living Bread Dough. . .right. "You mean it rises all on its own?"  
  
"The yeast does it."  
  
Hmm. Come to think of it, I did remember hearing something about that in science. Something about the reproduction of yeast cells. Oh well. At least Marco wasn't around to-  
  
KER-BANG!  
  
I spun around. Marco had dumped an armload of firewood into the-the. . .the, uh. . .firewood holder thingy. When he saw me, covered in flour, and probably still having a puzzled look on my face from trying to figure out the Night of the Living Bread Dough mystery, I could tell he was just itching to say something. He didn't though.  
  
Damn. That must mean last night wasn't some dream my subconscious sent to make me be nicer to Marco. Well, if he wasn't going to say anything, neither was I. Besides, once I thought about it, there wasn't much I could say to him. Yeah, he was wearing these knee-length pants that brought the word "capris" to mind, but I was the one with about five pounds of petticoats. And, ok, he had what looked like a small branch, leaves and all, stuck in his hair, but mine was in dorky pigtail braids. So all in all, we were about even.  
  
"Rachel, when you're uh, done, I think we need to talk."  
  
Hah! He wanted to apologize. Good, because I sure as hell wasn't going to go first.  
  
When Marco had gone back out to do whatever kind of chore Mrs. Campbell had sent him on, Mary nudged me. "Go," she whispered, making sure her mother wasn't looking. She untied my apron and tried to brush some of the flour off me. It was pretty much a lost cause. I was surprised Mary was doing this, though. So far I had sort of bonded the most with Rebecca, even though she had seemed a little stuck up and aloof. Now, however, she was glaring at me like I had just stabbed her mother.  
  
I shrugged. I could worry about Rebecca's evil glare later. Or better yet, find a way home and NEVER have to worry about it. Thanking Mary, I tiptoed to the door, trying to avoid Mrs. Campbell's hawk eyes (and considering I actually know how good hawks can see, saying someone has hawk eyes is saying a lot). Once outside, I celebrated me freedom a little too soon, before I realized I had no idea where Marco was.  
  
I headed for the barn first. The hope of catching him milking a cow or something equally glamorous was too tempting to pass up. I was delighted when, entering the barn, I found him mucking out a stall. What the stall had previously held-a cow, a horse, whatever-wouldn't make a difference. I knew from my time with Cassie that mucking was an unpleasant (and smelly) chore.  
  
"Well, well, well," I said, not bothering to hide my amusement. Afterwards, though, I wondered if that was wise-he was after all, the one with a pitchfork.  
  
Marco glanced up at me. "That was fast."  
  
"Yeah, Mary-"  
  
"It doesn't matter." He cut in coldly.  
  
"Say what? I know you didn't just interrupt me-"  
  
"Yeah, I did. So what are you going to do about it?"  
  
We glared at each other. So much for thinking he was planning to patch things up. "What did you want to talk about?" I purposely avoided his question.  
  
"Paul Revere. Last night. That means the first battle of the Revolutionary War is today. Whatever the aliens sent us here to do, I bet it has something to do with that."  
  
"I don't like wars." I instantly felt stupid for exposing myself, but it was true. I'd seen too many of them the time we'd followed Visser Four through time with the Time Matrix. Fighting the Yeerks was one thing. I wanted all of those evil slugs to die. But humans killing humans was just plain wrong.  
  
Marco's eyes softened for a second. "Neither do I." The cold look came back. "But I want to get out of here. And if that's what it takes. . ."  
  
"How do you even know that's what we're supposed to do?"  
  
"You think it's just a coincidence they sent us to THIS day, THIS year?" he said in a DUH voice.  
  
"Oh." I said. "Well, you're the smart one." I clamped my teeth down on my tongue. Damn! Where had THAT come from?  
  
But I let my poor tongue go when Marco looked at me and said. "No. I'm the really, really stupid one."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Never mind. Just forget it."  
  
But I knew I wouldn't. 


	9. Those Emotional Males

I remembered!!! * cheering, marching band, assorted dancing people in Hork-Bajir costumes * Well, not the original reason for Karen being around, since I changed the original plot (I think in that one Karen died), but now she's here for a reason that doesn't really show itself for a VERY long time (ok, in the sequel I'm planning to write) and because I just loved having her jump around in one of the earlier chapters. Now, you might have to go back to like, Chapter 5, to remember what I'm talking about. . .I had to myself. Oh, and so Jinako knows, Marco's going to be suffering for quite a while longer! And I thought you had abandoned my story, it took you so long to review! But, on the bright side, it made type up this chapter, which has been in waiting for a while because of the Karen issue, a lot faster! ~Amora  
~Jake~  
  
You think she remembers we wanted to kill her? Tobias whispered.  
  
"Karen!" Cassie exclaimed, and hugged her like she was a long lost cousin or something. "Oh, I haven't seen you in years! How have you been?"  
  
"Oh, I've been good," Karen said. "What about you? Did you ever hear from Aftran? How's she doing?"  
  
I wondered how Cassie was going to explain that one.  
  
"Aftran's a whale now," she said as gently as possible.  
  
"She's. . .a whale?" Karen wrinkled her forehead in confusion. "Did she. . .get fat or something?"  
  
"No, no," Cassie laughed. "She MORPHED a whale. Permanently. She's free now."  
  
"That's good," Karen smiled in relief. Me, I was trying to rid the image of fat, bloated, Aftran-the-whale-Yeerk from my brain.  
  
"Don't mean to interrupt this little reunion, but. . ." I gestured to the Helmets, one of which was dabbing at its eyes with what seemed to be a tin foil hanky.  
  
This is so sweet, he/she sniffed.  
  
The other rolled its eyes, which was pretty freaky, seeing as when the Helmets rolled their eyes, their eyes really rolled around on top of their heads. Males, the Helmet, which must have been female and was also the one with the "I'm with stupid" T-shirt said. They're always so emotional.  
  
A small part of me rejoiced that Rachel wasn't around to comment on that.  
  
Uh, Mr. and Mrs. Helmet? Tobias asked hesitantly. Why did you send Rachel and. . .Marco?  
  
Well, they were annoying.  
  
Karen looked like she was trying to stifle a laugh.  
  
Cassie was looking at Tobias with an aww-he's-jealous-that's-so-sweet look.  
  
Tobias just looked pissed.  
  
"So why are you here?" Cassie asked Karen, seemingly determined to carry on a normal conversation, despite the abnormality of the situation.  
  
"Oh!" Karen exclaimed. "I almost forgot!" She slid out from under the lime- green shoulder bag she was wearing. Opening it up, she pulled out a small object. "Do you have any idea what this is?"  
  
Cassie took the object from Karen, and showed it to me. It seemed to be made up of three circles, one larger, the other two smaller, and stuck together so they resembled the recognizable Mickey Mouse signature. But that wasn't what caught my attention. It was the strange writings on it.  
  
That writing is Skrit Na. Ax said stuffily. Probably useless. . .some trinket or another they stole, and marked as their own.  
  
"What does it say?"  
  
I think it's some sort of puzzle. 'Is the grass greener on the other side? To find out, just give me a try.'  
  
"That's not right." Cassie said. " 'The grass is greener on the other side' is a human expression. How would these aliens know it? And why would that write something that, when translated into English, rhymed?"  
  
"Maybe they meant for humans to find it?"  
  
"Then why not just write it in English? That wouldn't make any sense. Unless. . ." Cassie trailed off.  
  
"Unless they knew that there was only two species on this planet that could read it. The Yeerks, and the Andalite Bandits." I finished.  
  
I looked at it again. There were no buttons, no switches. Nothing to indicate how to "give it a try". Not that I was sure I wanted to.  
  
It had to be for us. Tobias said, rejoining the conversation. Why else would they send it to Karen, someone who would bring it to us?  
  
Your friend Karen was at one time a Controller, Ax pointed out. Perhaps it was assumed that since she is still alive, this position must still be held.  
  
"So it could go either way." I sighed. "Great."  
  
The Helmets were still standing silently, watching our conversation intently. Strangely, it didn't bother me. I knew it should have, especially considering what they were related to, but I had the feeling they really were here for what they had said, and I was pretty sure they wouldn't let anything happen to Rachel and Marco and ruin their memories. But, I was still thinking about something.  
  
"Hey, Helmets? How exactly do Rachel and Marco and Rachel get back here anyway?"  
  
I swear, the female Helmet smiled intently. She knew what she was about to say was not going to be met with smiles and hugs. When they die in the time line they are in, they will instantly be back here. Fully intact and with plenty of valuable memories.  
  
"They die?"  
  
They die.  
  
And then, a red-tailed hawk fell out of a tree nearby when Tobias fainted. 


	10. Applebutter Fingers

Just in case anyone else noticed, there were a lot of problems with the last chapter. It was rushed, not to mention chopped up, and hastily rewritten innumerable times. Just in case anyone else was panicking, don't worry, Marco and Rachel will NOT die permanently (at least not in this fic * evil giggle *). When they die in the 1700's, they will instantly be back to their normal time frame so the Helmets can copy their memories.  
  
And also, if anyone wants to discuss plot with me, I'm having some problems with the ending. . .I have about 4 or 5 possible endings, and I have one vote from Black Opal, but then, she's a die-hard Tobias/Rachel fan, so. . .anyway, my AIM s/n is Starz4598 if you're interested ^_^  
  
~Marco~  
  
"Stop humming."  
  
"I am NOT humming."  
  
"Yes you are." Rachel said impatiently. "You are humming Blink 182 'What's My Age Again' which, I have to admit, is a perfect song for you, but you're humming it off key."  
  
"Oh." I paused. "Well, when we get back to our time, I'll join the Glee Club if I can fit it in with battling the Yeerks and changing Baby-Think- It-Through's diapers. Would that make you happy?"  
  
"Baby-Think-It-Through? Oh no!" Rachel exclaimed. "Do you think anyone took care of her?"  
  
"What, are your maternal instincts finally kicking in?"  
  
"It's worth 60% of our grade, in case you forgot."  
  
"Oh no! Do you think anyone took care of her?"  
  
Rachel groaned, and I would have laughed had I not remembered I was still mad at her. "How much farther do you think it is?" she said. I felt a small twinge of pity for her. She was wearing an incredible amount of layers of long skirts, and had to be sweltering. I was getting pretty toasty myself. Rachel tossed her blonde hair, having just freed it from the bonnet and tight braids. I mentally scolded myself for watching.  
  
"I think it's just about another mile. I can hear them."  
  
"That's what you said a mile ago."  
  
"Yeah, but now I'm serious."  
  
"I thought this was all in the same town. . .why is it taking so long?"  
  
"Because, contrary to popular 21st century belief, towns are actually miles long and wide. It's just that riding in a car-or flying-makes everything seem so much smaller."  
  
"You sound like a nerd. Remind me again why we didn't fly."  
  
"Do YOU want to show up to the Revolutionary War in a leotard?"  
  
"Ulch." Rachel shuddered.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Just got a mental image of you in a leotard."  
  
I didn't say anything. Rachel took the hint and fell silent as well, For about three seconds.  
  
"NOW how much farther is it?"  
  
* * *  
  
I'm not quite sure what I expected to see of the Revolutionary War's first battle. The last time I had visited this particular war, it had been cold. And night. But mostly cold. And then there was shooting, and cold water, and a lot of dying.  
  
Well, the war didn't start out that way.  
  
It was a sunny April day. There were birds chirping. Green grass, pretty spring flowers, and then soldiers: British soldiers, all neat and lined up in cute little rows and wearing their matching red uniforms that must have been really warm. And the colonies. . .well. . .  
  
They were not wearing matching uniforms. They were not in cute little rows.  
  
More or less, it was a bunch of guys grouped together, holding guns and glaring at the British. Matter of fact, there was a lot of glaring going on from both sides. And once I thought about, there wasn't much else happening either.  
  
"So THIS is your big battle?"  
  
"It hasn't started yet." I said in self-defense. "There will be one shot fired, the 'Shot Heard Round the World'. Then everyone will go crazy."  
  
"Right." Rachel rolled her eyes and grabbed my arm. "Let's go."  
  
"Go? Go where?" I asked as she dragged me in the direction of the colonial side.  
  
"We're supposed to be here? Well, let's find out why."  
  
"There's one problem with that. I might fit in ok, but there probably aren't that many blond girls without their cute little bonnets on down there." Rachel dig her nails into my arm, and I couldn't stifle the little "Yipe!" of pain.  
  
"They can deal." She said, and pulled me right into the crowd of staring patriots. A few of them temporarily stopped their looks at the British to glare at us for interrupting the sacred ritual, but Rachel glared right back at them, and I know from experience, that girl has one of the best evil eyes of all time, right up there with Crayak, who basically IS an eye.  
  
"Now what?" Rachel whispered to me.  
  
"Now what?!" I hissed under my breath. "This was YOUR brilliant idea!"  
  
"No, it was yours, you just didn't have the balls to carry it out." I was about to object, but something caught my eye. A soldier/patriot/minuteman/whatever the called `em back then-now?-was staring at Rachel. He was young, I'd say late teens to early twenties, but had kind of an unclean look to him. Unshaven, which was understandable seeing as he'd probably been woken up in the middle of the night to be here, but his eyes were also bloodshot. My opinion was that he looked stoned, but who knew if people smoked pot in the 1700's?  
  
"Hey," I poked Rachel in the side. "You've got an admirer." I pointed to Stoned.  
  
"Hmm. Might be kinda cute if he was fixed up." That just showed the difference between what girls notice and what guys notice. "But that is so not the point."  
  
"So what is the point?"  
  
"We're here. I'm hot. If we don't get out of here soon, I am going to get extremely cranky. DO SOMETHING!"  
  
"Would you rather go back to the Campbell's? Maybe they're making apple butter not."  
  
Rachel threw her hands up in exasperation. "Never mind. I'll do this myself is I have to."  
  
"What are you planning on doing?" I yelled after her as she walked away. She didn't look back. Just to add insult to injury, Stoned, who had been watching us the entire time, followed after her. As I was muttering under my breath some not-kind things about girls, I saw it. A gun-rifle, I guess-just lying on the ground in plain view. It'd be a shame if it got stepped on or something. . .  
  
So I picked it up.  
  
Word to the wise: Trying to pick a gun up by the trigger? BAD idea.  
  
BA-BOOM!  
  
The gun fired off into the air. Suddenly, the staring was over. Guns were being picked up. Shots were being fired.  
  
That's when it dawned on me. I had just accidentally fired the first shot of the Revolutionary War. The "Shot Heard Round the World."  
  
I had just started the Revolutionary War.  
  
What was I going to tell Rachel?? 


	11. Procrastinator's Peace Offering

Yes, I know this should be the latest chapter of my FanFic (which is not yet finished) but this idea came to me, and I just had to type it up. The next chapter SHOULD be around soon, but this should keep everyone mildly entertained in the meantime..  
  
Top Ten Ways You Know You're Dedicated to Your Animorphs FanFic.  
  
10. While searching some of the few still-active Animorphs fanfiction sites out there, you realize that despite your efforts you cannot find one single Rachel/Marco pairing. You find this somewhat strange seeing as when you were an innocent little eight year old, only having read about two books, neither of which really told you there was something Rachel/Tobias, R/M was the first pairing you came up with (the fact that Tobias was a bird probably didn't help any). After some heavy thought, you wonder is KA actually intended for Marco to be gay, or if that's just the world today's twisted minds. . .oh, he's too busy saving the world to have a girlfriend, so he must be gay, let's hook him up with Ax, the only other single Animorph, so he must also be gay, despite the fact that there has been several references throughout the book of him being interested in Andalite females, not to mention the whole Estrid thing. Would someone please explain to me how Marco/Tobias or Jake/Tom pairings are any more ludicrous then R/M? (*note: I'm probably going to get some heavy flames on this, but I wrote it after reading a list of "Ways You Know Your Animorphs Fic Sucks" and one of them was "you decide Rachel would be much better off with Marco". There was also a lot of other stuff that was pretty stupid, such as the insinuation that if you make a self-insertation fic, it was automatically better if you give the character a really "original"-weird- name-I can't remember what the example was-even though all the Animorphs except Ax have normal, nondescript names. The person that wrote this list really got to me, if you can't all tell.)  
  
9. You make a Sims family named "Animorphus" with the two adults named Marco and Rachel, make them fall in love, and begin to populate Sim City with their spawn (not that I would actually do this *loud, hacking cough *)  
  
8. In a fit of boredom, during which you have no access to a computer, you decide to try and draw the Animorphs, despite the fact that all you can draw is anime. You remember this when you discover that Rachel looks like Sailor Venus, Cassie kind of like a black Sailor Mercury, and Marco and Jake both look like Tuxedo Mask, only Jake's a lot taller (also, Ax kind of resembles My Pretty Pony).  
  
7. You're up on the computer so late writing the fic, that your father, who has this Benjamin Franklin "early to bed, early to rise" motto, finds it necessary to yell at you to go to bed every 10 minutes on the dot ("It's midnight! Time to go to bed!" "Just five more minutes!"). Finally, unable to take it any longer, you respond with "Shut the hell up already!" causing you to become grounded for two weeks.  
  
6. While doing research for said fic, which happens to be a time travel and mostly takes part during Revolutionary War, you stumble upon a site that, while helpful, has annoying patriotic background music. This music overlaps with the Kelly Rowland you are playing, and as you can find no way to turn it off, you sadly stop the Kelly Rowland, as the two together sound much worse then one alone. As you're reading, you suddenly discover that you are unconsciously singing along with that "Glory, Glory Hallelujah" song you can't even remember the name to. Despite your horror, you are still willing to continue reading, for the sake of the fics accuracy, which is kind of a waste, seeing as the only thing you know for sure is correct is that the Revolutionary War started in April.  
  
5. You try to find out if hawks can actually faint. This process includes asking your vet when you happen to take your cat with the amputated tail in for a check up. When the vet responds that he's pretty sure birds cannot faint (although he's never actually treated a red-tail hawk) you shrug and say "Oh, well, he's part human anyway" without realizing how that must sound to your poor, confused vet who's response is an incredibly blank stare and an attempt to pretend the whole exchange never happened by telling your mother that Midnight the cat needs to eat either Vaseline or pumpkin so that he will no longer be constipated.  
  
4. During Math class when you're supposed to be working on problem #13 (4.5x + 6.34 = 100.41) you are struck with a sudden inspiration on how to write that make out scene you've been thinking about inserting somewhere. About halfway through the class, your teacher discovers that there is no possible way you could be working that fast and with that much enthusiasm, and heads over to investigate. Thinking you are writing a note, she confiscates it and decides the class needs to be informed on whatever personal, embarrassing issue you could be writing about. But, since the scene is written in Rachel's point of view (although you don't remember her name ever actually being mentioned) and you once dated a guy named Marco (long story) the class totally takes the whole thing the wrong way, and you are publicly humiliated, despite your protests of "It's just fiction! It's not THAT Marco!"  
  
3. As a last ditch effort to get more specific details on the day of the "Shot Heard Round the World", you try to talk to your history teacher, despite the fact that the two of you share a hate-hate relationship. He claims to believe you're gathering this information to launch another Anti- Bush/Anti-War attack in class, and refuses to tell you anything, but you think he's really using this as an excuse to hide the fact that *gasp * teachers really don't know everything!  
  
2. You talk to a bunch of kids who had to do the Baby-Think-It-Through project last year, since it is no longer available. When talking to the teacher who taught the class, you find out the reason for this is that 3 kids broke the keys used to feed the babies, 2 accidentally flushed the keys down their toilets, 1 Baby-Think-It-Through ended up mauled by a students pet Rottweiler, and 1 senior girl was in a car accident because Baby-Think-It-Through went off in traffic.  
  
And the number one Way You Can Tell You're Dedicated to Your Animorphs FanFic is :  
  
1. Your younger sister performs a series of tests to see exactly what can lure you away from the computer while you're busy writing. The list consists of A) Food B) need to use the bathroom and/or shower C) Buffy* , and D) finding out your younger sister decided to write a human interest piece for her school newspaper based on the results of her test.  
  
* A girl needs her daily dose of James Marsters standing around naked and getting beat up by Buffy.anyone that can get beat up by a girl and still look sexy is good. Very Good. 


	12. Yesterday I Cried

And now, to everybody, the name of the Chapter 10 was actually supposed to be (Apple) Butter Fingers, but for some reason I can't have parenthesis in the chapter titles. And just for the record everybody, this story is dedicated to my annoying younger sister Rebecca, because, believe it or not, the whole Marco starting the Revolutionary War thing was her idea, kind of a "wouldn't it be funny if" type thing, and this story spawned off of that. The first chapter was something I wrote on a scrap piece of paper during math class (Thank you Andy! It was his paper, and I still have it). After that, I remembered the Revolutionary story I had been thinking about writing, and somehow the two ended up combined. I know this took forever!!! It was a really difficult chapter for me to write, but it was crucial to the plot, so it had to go in somewhere, as much as I put it off, so again, I'm sorry it took so long. And to whoever left that anonymous message under the name "annoyed", go to hell. I worked hard on this chapter and didn't want to post it half finished and crappy, not to mention I had finals, and, oh, a life. To those of you that waited patiently, I'm finally on summer vacation and should, theoretically, be able to post a lot more often now that I have more free time.  
  
~Rachel~  
  
PopPopPopPopPopPop!  
  
Aw, damn it. The war had started.  
  
John-the guy that had followed me when I stormed away from Marco in a fit of rage-shoved me down. I guess being a girl gave me some sort of right to fear and potential safety. Normally, I would have jumped right in the middle of everything, but this wasn't my kind of fight. I didn't have a big old out of date musket (not that I would have been able to shoot one if I did) or even a sword, which I saw some men actually had. Nope, all I had was a bear morph and a passion for fighting, neither of which was going to be much help to me at the current moment.  
  
So I just stayed put, crouched down behind John who, fortunately, was not front line material. My first thought was that my skirt was getting muddy. My second thought was that my first thought was superficial and I should be more worried about Marco. My third thought was that my second thought was even more ludicrous then my first, and I should just stop thinking all together.  
  
My compromise was to rack my brain for any memories of what had happened in the first battle of the Revolutionary War (did it actually have a name?) and how many people had died. Also if there was any mention of an unidentified blond girl mysteriously found dead in the middle of the battlefield. Hey, if there was the mystery of the Lost Colony or whatever, then why not the theory of a combination Jane Doe and Sarah Ferguson, the chick who was stampeded in the Revolutionary War?  
  
Not surprisingly, I didn't come up with anything. Curse the public school learning system.  
  
Then, we were retreating. Yes, retreating. No, I never would have come up with that word myself, but someone yelled out "Retreat!" and then we were hauling ass into the woods. Forget pride, we weren't winning, and poison ivy seemed a lot better then bullet-in-head.  
  
Unfortunately, the position I was in didn't leave me much opportunity for fleeing in panic. In fact, I was in a much better position to be trampled underfoot, which I was. A big black boot came down on my left hand. I instinctively swung out my right arm and hit Black Boot's ankle. Black Boot went down. I felt a little better.  
  
John grabbed my arm and roughly pulled me to my feet. I shoved him away. Like I couldn't run away on my own. In reality, I didn't really run, just stomped huffily towards the woods. Let the British shoot me. In the mood I was in, they were the ones that ought to have been running.  
  
I hit the patch of trees and kept going. Pain in the ass or not, I was finding Marco and some way out of this. I could not stand another minute in this century.  
  
John followed me the entire way, and it was a while before I realized I was heading right into a thick patch of trees. Unless Marco needed to relieve himself, there wasn't much chance he'd be there. I really must have been mad, because I had wandered so far away from the army, I could hardly even hear them anymore.  
  
"God dammit!" I screamed, kicking the nearest tree.  
  
John watched me with a keen sort of interest. He was really getting on my nerves. "There, there, what ails you now, pretty girl?" He stepped closer to me and reached up like he was going to touch my hair. He smelled like alcohol. I shoved him away, and he stumbled backwards into a bush.  
  
"Stay away from me."  
  
"Now, now, don't do that," He approached me cautiously this time. I tried backing up, but ended up pinning myself against a tree. When I reached up my hand to slap him, he grabbed my wrist.  
  
I already knew what he was going to try to do. Stupid me, I had never thought about people from this time being anything other then.well, pure, I guess. The way they dressed suggested that, but the number of kids they had should have told me otherwise.  
  
John's hand reached up to the neckline of my dress. I screamed and he shoved his hand over my mouth, roughly pushing the back of my head into the tree. I bit his fingers hard, but he only grimaced. Despite my resistance, I could feel tears starting to flood my eyes.  
  
i I'll show this son of a bitch, /i I thought as I started morphing.  
  
He didn't notice right away, but it didn't take him long. I was getting close to seven feet tall, gaining hundreds of pounds, not to mention sprouting a lot of brown fur. My dress was starting to burst at the seams. Literally.  
  
He stepped back and watched me in stunned amazement for a few seconds as I continued morphing into a full-grown male grizzly bear. Then, no surprise, he started running. Almost fully bear, I dropped down to all fours and lumbered after him. It wasn't to stop him from running back to the army and telling everyone about the amazing bear-girl, although the thought was on my mind. It was about revenge. I wanted to hurt him like he had tried to hurt me.  
  
I caught him in about four seconds flat. Holding him up by his shoulders, I dug my claws into his flesh as he cried and begged for mercy. Like I had, and probably like any other girls he had tried to rape. What had he done to them, were they still alive, living in shame and not able to tell anyone what had happened because they believed it was their own fault, or had he done what some 21st century rapists did and killed them, dumping the bodies somewhere? Was that what he had been planning to do to me?  
  
I burned with rage, so much that I actually felt hot from the inside of me. Not the grizzly, the grizzly was unconcerned, but me, human Rachel, was mad. Very mad.  
  
And me, the human Rachel, threw John into a tree. And me, Rachel, watched as his neck snapped and he died. I had killed him.  
  
Technically, I guess it would be labeled self-defense. But I knew better then that. I didn't have to kill him. He had no gun, no visible knife or other weapon. As a grizzly bear, I could have just walked away. He might have been an evil, desperate, sickening person, but he was still a person and I had killed him.  
  
But oddly, I felt nothing.  
  
I demorphed. The dress was literally in shreds. The only thing to have survived was the apron. With a lot of ripping, tying, and trial and error, I was able to piece the torn cloth back into something vaguely resembling a dress. I put it on and tied the apron over it.  
  
John was slumped against the tree, his eyes open and staring, but starting to glaze over from death. I took one of the longer cloth pieces I hadn't been able to use and tied it around his head, covering his eyes like a blindfold. I left the area calmly.  
  
I walked through the woods towards the noise of the retreated army. At first it was hard to tell where the sounds of voices, horses, and footsteps were coming from, but as I got closer, they became louder. And finally, as I shoved my way through one more large, prickly bush, I nearly fell into the arms of a man around my father's age.  
  
"Now where did you come from?" He asked looking at me curiously as he helped steady me. I moved away from him quickly. No answering questions. I didn't like making up answers.  
  
"Rachel! RA-CHEL!"  
  
There, up ahead of me, was Marco, pushing his way through the crowd to get to me. I was surprised to find myself moving in his direction as well. When we finally reached each other, he looked me up and down.  
  
"What happened to your clothes? And your little friend...the one that looks like he has a hangover? Wait...clothes...boy toy..." Marco's eyes widened as he looked at me suspiciously.  
  
"Whatever you're thinking in your perverted little head, stop it now." I said, even though I knew exactly what he was thinking. For some reason, one I couldn't even explain to myself, it made me feel worse that he would think...that.  
  
"So what happened then?" Marco asked smugly.  
  
"I killed him." Why did my eyes feel tingly? Why did my throat ache so much? It was almost like I was going to cry...no, I must be getting sick or something. Marco was looking at me in amazement, shock, and...could that be fear?  
  
"He-he tried to-" I desperately tried to defend myself, but now it was official. I was crying. Marco's expression had changed. He finally got it.  
  
"Oh...Rachel, oh God, I didn't know...please don't cry..." Naturally, I began to sob even harder. "Come on Rachel...you can punch me, would that make you feel better?"  
  
I sniffed and shook my head. It was tempting, but I didn't feel like hurting anyone else for the day.  
  
"Um...a hug?"  
  
He expected me to shoot him down, and to be perfectly honest, projectile vomiting iwas/i the first thing that came to mind. But instead, for reasons even I'm not sure about, I threw myself at Marco and wrapped my arms around his neck as I buried my face in his shoulder and continued to sob. Had I been in a better mood, I might have commented on the fact that I had to stoop a few inches to do this.  
  
But oddly, I didn't even want to. 


	13. Giggling Terror

~Marco~  
  
I heard giggling.  
  
Female giggling, to be exact. And let me tell you, there is nothing that will strike fear into the heart of a teenage boy more then female giggling. Especially when the source is unknown.  
  
It wasn't Rachel, that was for sure. For one thing, she isn't a giggler. But the main reason was I knew exactly where she was-upstairs where Mary Campbell was trying to fix her up before Old Lady Campbell saw her.  
  
So it had to be Campbell girls.  
  
I'm not stupid. I knew the gigglers had to be Rebecca and the oldest blonde girl, Bunny or Muffy or something. And I knew what they were giggling at. What else could it be with a male specimen as gorgeous as myself sitting alone on their couch-the couch that could also double as a quite comfy bed, when necessary.  
  
I sighed.  
  
Now don't get me wrong. Ordinarily, I'd be thrilled. Ecstatic. Rubbing it in Rachel's pretty face until she came back with a comment about how in our time, Rebecca was nothing more then bones in a grave. Like I hadn't already thought about that.  
  
But no, the thing keeping me from the profound joy I SHOULD have been feeling was, naturally, Rachel.  
  
I think, just maybe, she enjoys torturing me.  
  
But the point was, she was still my friend. I think. And she had been through an experience that blew my mind-or what's left of it-away. Anything that could make Rachel, Xena: Warrior Princess, cry like that would probably have a normal person in serious therapy. Of course, "Animorph" is an antonym for "abnormal".  
  
"Tee-hee."  
  
The damn giggling just wasn't going to stop.  
  
I sighed again. Sometimes it's exhausting to be this irresistible.  
  
I got up off the couch and make my way to where I thought the noise was coming, just outside the living room/parlor. I was pretty sure Rebecca and her sister were spying on me. Sure enough, they were there, pretending to act surprised when I walked up to them.  
  
"Now which of you lovely ladies has been watching me?"  
  
Buffy/Honey opened her mouth to speak, but Rebecca cut her off. "I think Jenny is too young to appreciate..." she looked me up and down coyly. "Men. So by process of elimination that leaves..." Hmm. Definitely a girl who knew what she wanted. I could get to like this. Also the blonde's name was Jenny. Who knew?  
  
Rachel had told me Mary was really sweet but the blonde-Jenny!-was quiet and snobbish, and Rebecca, basically, a bitch. But then, Rachel isn't exactly known for her sweet disposition, either. And besides, maybe I could get bitchy girls out of my system once and for all. It was a nice thought, at least.  
  
I draped my arm across Rebecca's shoulder and steered her towards the door leading outside. "I think you and I are going to get along just fine."  
  
~ ~ ~  
  
Rebecca was pretty, there was no denying that, but it was in an unusual way. Well, unusual compared to the girls I knew. She was average height, and thin, but not anorexic-thin. From what I could see of her hair, hidden as it was under her bonnet, I was reasonably sure it was very dark brown. Her facial features were very delicate and girly, her skin pale white, but creamy looking. Milk-white, I guess they call it. Her eyes were large and dark and her lips a perfect, natural red. This was a girl that with the right clothes and haircut could rival Rachel herself.  
  
And I could talk to her, too. Oh, I had to cut down on the humor. I realized that when I compared Rachel to Angelica Pickles, grown up and on PMS. Talk about the wrong generation (something my parents always used to say when they made some joke about when they where kids and I didn't get it. Now I understood how they felt). But it was still a nice change to be able to talk to a pretty girl and not be threatened by castration or worse (only Rachel could think up a threat worse then castration).  
  
But there was something missing. You know that funny feeling of your blood pumping just a little too fast, and your breathing coming a little too heavy and noticeable, the feeling that you get when you're around someone you really like? That wasn't there. Talking to Rebecca, well, I might as well have been talking to Cassie. Only Rebecca didn't preach. And I was pretty sure she was about as fond of Rachel as Rachel was of her.  
  
But I still liked talking to her. And I even liked when she flirted with me. Even if I didn't feel the same way, it was still nice to feel wanted by someone. I mean, come on. There was a bad boys-to-girls ratio of Animorphs, and let's face it, the girls at school weren't exactly falling all over me, either, probably because I wasn't even close to being a jock.  
  
The fact that I was passed up for a bird didn't help my confidence any.  
  
So when Rebecca leaned in to kiss me, I only hesitated for a moment. I knew it was stupid to keep wanting someone that would never feel the way about me that I felt about them.  
  
~ ~ ~  
  
"Damn it. Do they have cigarettes here? I want a cigarette."  
  
I looked up at Rachel from the book I was trying to read. I'd been bored listening to her rat when I should have been sleeping and grabbed it off a shelf, only to be greeted with a lot of "thee's" and "thou's". If there was a plot, I had yet to discover it. "You don't smoke."  
  
"How would you know?"  
  
"How could I NOT know? My social life consists of five people, two of which aren't even human. I could recite every single one of their likes, dislikes, pet peeves, and crushes in chronological order. That includes you."  
  
Rachel stopped pacing across the Campbell's living room. From what I had heard earlier, Mrs. Campbell had tried to make her sew. It had not been pretty. "Yeah, well, sometimes people do things you wouldn't expect. Like make out with girls that could very possibly be their ancestors."  
  
"You were spying one me?!" I exclaimed, not sure whether to be flattered or annoyed.  
  
"Of course not." Rachel looked at me like I was crazy, "What the hell was I supposed to think, the Goddamned rooster gave her that hickey?"  
  
"Oops." I said guiltily. "Well, you WOULD know better then me if birds can give hickeys."  
  
Rachel threw a book at me. And not playfully, she was actually trying to nail me in the face with it. Hard. That girl has some arm. I just barely ducked in time. As the book hit the floor with a thud, I happened to notice what it was.  
  
The Bible.  
  
"You never think about anyone but yourself." Rachel muttered as she turned around and stomped upstairs to go to bed. "You could get us thrown out if Campbell finds out you're necking her daughter. That is, if they even know what necking is."  
  
As she disappeared from my line of vision, I wanted to yell after her, tell her she was wrong, I didn't just thing about my self.  
  
In fact, for the last few months or so, she was all I ever thought about.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Late answers to reviewers (from chapter 11):  
  
Oedipal Kat: Yes, number 4 actually did happen. But I was optimistic about it, it could have been worse. It could have been from Marco's point of view...  
  
SaraM: Finally! Someone that understands me!  
  
Jinako-chan: Yeah, I read your fic Be Stupid. Well, parts of it anyway. I generally don't have a problem with slash, but I just don't see the Marco/Ax connection. I mean, the only Animorphs slash I can stand is Jake/Marco (although I did read a Marco/Erek once that was good, but never finished).  
  
Chapter 12:  
  
Nora: Ok, here is an example of a proper review. "I don't like your fic BECAUSE..." I mean, how in the world is "I don't think your fic is that good maybe you should practice more" going to help me? Practice what? Plot? Character development? Originality? Descriptions?  
  
Everyone: Hehehe, shocked you all did I? Well, more is com-Oh, wait, nope, that's about the only really big shocker I've got planned. Damn.  
  
Shameless plug-check out my new site at... 


	14. Update kinda

I know, I know, it's been too long. And you're probably all going to run after me with pointy objects when you realize chapter 14 isn't a chapter at all...that YBN is still on a now year-long hiatus. But I figured, you know, I'd respond to reviews, and try to explain a bit on WHY I haven't updated in almost a year. Oh, and yeah, my penname, Amora, is sadly no more since because of the new system I ended up as Amora1, and I just wasn't going to stand for that. So yes, Amora and Catty Vancouver are one and the same, for those of you that have seen my profile, my real name is Sara-Catherine, but I usually go by Catty or just Sara. If the other Amora falls off the face of the earth, I'll return to the other name.

WHY THE LACK OF UPDATE:

Oh, where to begin...life in general, put together with a new school, starting high school, keeping up with friends at old school, not to mention an extreme case in writer's block and a desire to update my other poor, unfinished, fic...but I promise, a new chapter is coming, this story isn't dead. I've put too much thought into it to give up now, but it might still be a while L

Reviewers:

Freak Apple: Don't worry, I promise they're not related. Apparently Marco just goes for much older woman. innocent shrug Not that it's my fault or anything.

LadyLarian/SaraM/Simply Sara: I'm not the only one with the name change, then? Well, I'm glad you like it but feel a certain amount of sympathy to anyone enthralled since I take so long...I know how much I hate it when I get involved in a story I really like and then the horrible writer stops updating.

EsotericEric: Yes, Rachel tried to hit him with a Bible. Just something I thought was ironically funny, although I guess no one else except Jinako thought so. Get used to the animosity, it will be there for a while. And does Rachel like Marco? Lol, even I'm not really sure, but I think the best answer is "not yet". And Marco has more then a thing, he's ooey-gooey head over heels...but I'm still working on conveying that. It's coming.

Jinako-chan: Ah, my absolute favorite reviewer. backtracks Uh, not that the rest of you aren't important, but...but...her's are long!! And she got that the Bible thing was supposed to be funny. And yeah, Marco's timing might have been bad, but you know, people often don't realize their feelings for someone until they see them with someone else, right? So I think it was necessary in the big scheme of things later to come that I better stop talking about before I give away my story. And yep, it was Metallic Emotions, and I loved it, but it ended with the writer hacking up blood, and that was like over a year ago, so I don't think there's much of a future for that one.

Jesse: Tell me about it! I can't find any! sniffles someone has to write me one.

Phnx/Chaos: Yes, they're pissing me off to, but I couldn't just have them fall into each other's arms, I have an obsession with making things believable. Hope I'm doing a good job And this is another one where I sympathize...an update is coming!

BlackOpal: Chapter 12 Review: Whoops...must have forgotten to mention it. No one else mentioned that paragraph tear of appreciation I'm so glad someone else got it, it took me a few tries to make it sound right and then I guess everyone was a bit distracted with the rape thing.

Chapter 13: Yes, I thought the die-hard Tobias/Rachel would like that

FacelessName: Well, I'm glad at least one person responded with something other than a dropped jaw. I'm not really sure why or when I decided that a rape, or at least an attempted rape, had to happen, but I put it off for a while because I was nervous about writing it believably, but I felt it was something that had to happen to Rachel to make the Marco/Rachel work. I wanted an excuse to tweak her personality a bit, so some big trauma was needed. I toyed with several ideas, one of her actually being raped, but I don't think I would be able to write that accurately, another of it almost happening but Marco rushing in like a Calvary or something to save her, but to me it seemed like the typical female weaker then male thing, plus I didn't think Rachel would let, or almost let that happen just to keep her morphing secret. So I hope I did a decent job with what I ended up with, although I'm sure you'll all tell me if I didn't

Healer Arial: Haha! I got Tobias/Rachel-er's jumping on the Marco/Rachel bandwagon? Or at least appreciating it? Whoo-hoo!

Mikayla: Meh, it's close enough. I love reviews.

Christina: Oooh, compliments!!! I love, I love, thank you, thank you.

Redcoat: Look, dude, I'm trying here ok? I've said a few times that I'm not sure how accurate anything is, and I really don't appreciate the snottiness. I have absolutely no objections to being told I'm wrong, but I don't see why you seem to be taking it as a personal insult. If you'd like, send me an email sometime and I'd be happy to go over some of the true facts with you to try to make the story more authentic, but only if you're a little less rude.


	15. Being Brave

Rachel

The Campbell girls were all asleep. I paced back and forth across their bedroom for at least an hour. I had its eight steps memorized.

Step.

I'm stuck in the 1700's, right in the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

Step.

I'm stuck with Marco.

STEP, step.

I want to go home.

Step. Step. . .Wait.

Revolutionary War. Marco said it. We're here for a reason. The reason is not to play colonial girl and bake bread. The reason we're here has something to do with that war. There's no way we're going to get home if we stick to the Campbell's house.

I grabbed one of Rebecca's dresses out of her armoire and changed into it. Then I tiptoed down the stairs.

Marco was still awake, unfortunately, and was reading a book by candlelight.

He looked at my dress. "Where are you going?" he whispered.

"I want to get out of here," I hissed back at him. "You said it yourself. We're here cause of this war. Now let's go to it."

He stood up and set his book down. I noticed what it was-- The Bible. Marco had been reading the Bible?

"Rachel, it's the middle of the night. We don't even know what's going on with this war. It's not a good idea—"

"I don't care!" I said as forcefully as I could while still keeping my voice down so as not to wake the Campbells. "I want to go home! This century has done enough to me. I want to go home and go shopping and eat pizza and turn on lights and take warm baths. I don't want to wait here so long any chance we had of getting back is gone and I'm forced to live out the rest of my days without electricity."

"I know, I know," Marco said soothingly. "But Rachel, this is just not the-- wait, where are you going?"

I was already heading out the door. He followed after me.

"I'm going to the war. Didn't you hear what I just said?"

"Yes, but, Rachel, this is stupid, it's dark and. . .who's that?"

The last part was said cautiously. At the street there stood a group of young guys, maybe a few years older than Marco and I, it was hard to tell in the dark.

"Hey!" One of them called out to us. "Hey, girl, are you the one?"

"The one what?" I asked. Were they our way out of here? What was going on?

The group of guys stepped closer. There was a strong smell coming off them. Definitely some kind of alcohol. Marco was eyeing them warily.

"The one that was seen going off into the woods with our friend John." A different one said.

My heart started beating faster. In anger.

"Yes, it's a funny thing," the first one continued. "A pretty blonde girl no one's ever seen before goes into the woods with my brother John and later, he's found dead with a scrap of pink dress over his eyes."

"Your brother deserved what he got," Marco said firmly.

"So we go asking around," John's brother continued, his eyes narrowed in fury. "And we find out, there's a pretty blonde girl no one's ever seen before staying with our good neighbor, Mrs. Campbell."

"The old hag." One of the others muttered.

"But have you seen her oldest daughter?"

"So. . ." John's brother said, locking his eyes on me. "The loss of my brother is a great injustice, I think all will agree. Something must be done to even the score. What do you think we should do?"

"I think," I said, not breaking eye contact. "That you don't know who you're messing with. I think you should go home before you get me angry."

"Rachel. . ." Marco began. I shook my head and he stopped.

I felt like if I could stay calm, if I could make this guy go away, then everything that had happened early that day would be a mistake, and maybe not even have happened. If I could be THIS brave, then I couldn't have had something as horrible as THAT happen to me. I remembered my day wrong. Something.

Anything.

I could be brave. I was ALWAYS brave. That's what I was known for, being brave, fearless, reckless. I could do it now.

But oh, God, I was so afraid.

I hated it. The fear was like when you spill something sticky on your arm and it dries there and makes a hard shell. The fear disgusted me, and restricted me, like I couldn't move as much as normal.

I knew I didn't have to do this. I could morph. Fly away into the night and never have to face this.

I wanted to be brave.

I wanted Marco to see me be brave.

I stepped closer to John's brother.

He laughed at me. "What are you going to do, girl?"

"I killed your brother," I said. "I can do the same to you."

He laughed harder. It was a creepy laugh, like a crazy person in a movie. "John was weak. No doubt his weakness for women led to his downfall."

"You can't hurt me."

"Would you care to place a bet on that?"

And he had a gun in his hands suddenly. I didn't know where it came from. I hadn't seen it before. But I knew that now the odds were different. I couldn't out-morph a gun. Now he COULD hurt me. Kill me. Or Marco. Or both.

"Are you going to shoot me?" I asked. Still trying to be brave.

He nodded. "Yes, I think that would be fair, don't you?"

I pointed with my thumb at Marco, who was behind me. "Don't hurt him." I didn't look to see Marco's reaction.

John's brother nodded. He raised his gun to shoot me. I closed my eyes.

And I hit the ground.

BAM!

I opened my eyes.

I was lying sprawled in the dirt. Had I been shot? No, there was no pain, no blood. Then what. . .

Marco lay in front of me in a slowly growing pool of blood. He had. . .shoved me down? Jumped in front of me?

"No," I whispered.

He was dead.

"Stupid boy." John's brother said, kicking Marco's body. "I would have let him live."

Then he reloaded his gun, raised it, and aimed at me.

I waited.


	16. The Switch

Cassie

I ran. I dove. And I caught Tobias's unconscious hawk body just before it hit the ground.

"Did he just faint?" Karen asked. "I didn't even know birds could faint."

"He'll be fine!" I said, before anyone could panic. I could feel Tobias breathing.

"Rachel and Marco are going to die?" Jake asked, panicking.

"Yes, but only temporarily." The male Helmet said with a disapproving look at the female. "Once they're back here, they'll be perfectly fine and go on to live their lives as though nothing has happened."

"Oh," Jake said, relieved. "Well, I guess that's not so bad then."

"But what if they DON'T die?" I asked. "They could be there for decades. . ."

"Oh, no," the male reassured us. "Time moves much faster there. They've already been there several days by now. One of your years would be equal to 100 years where they are."

"Oh, thank God," In my relief I clutched Tobias to my chest a little too tightly. He awoke with what could only be described as a squawk.

What's going on? 

"You had a little fall," I said gently.

Oh. Cassie? 

"Yes?"

Could you put me down now? 

I laughed. "Oh, sure."

I was bending over to put Tobias on the ground when there was a flash of bright light and suddenly Marco was falling through the air right in front of me.

"Marco!" Jake exclaimed.

Marco hit the ground and gasped. He looked around wildly, then touched his face, chest, legs as if to make sure he was all there. I wondered what his death had been like.

His eyes met mine. "Where. . .? How?"

Then there was another flash and Rachel hit the ground right next to him.

Marco turned to look at her. Rachel stared at the ground for a few seconds, then looked up. Her face registered shock when she saw me. She did the whole looking-around-wildly-and-checking-body-parts thing.

Then she saw Marco.

I felt like I was intruding, like I wasn't supposed to say anything. I guess everyone else felt the same, because no one spoke, not Jake, Tobias, Ax, Karen, or the Helmets.

She looked at him with big, confused eyes. They stared at each other for what seemed like forever but must really have been only a few minutes.

Then Rachel burst into tears.

It was then I rushed forward. "Oh, Rachel," I said and hugged her, crazy colonial dress and all.

Jake walked up too, and held out a hand to help Marco up. Marco took it, and Jake pulled him to his feet.

"What happened?" Marco asked. "How did we get here?"

"Marco, man. . .you died."

"I died?"

"Yeah. . .that's what brought you back."

"Oh." Marco shook his head. "It didn't hurt. I thought it would hurt, you know?"

Jake nodded. "I remember."

"Why were we there?" Marco asked.

Jake looked at the Helmets. "It's a long story. But you're both back, so. . .so it's ok." He looked at Rachel, who was still sobbing into my shoulder. "Isn't it?"

Marco nodded. He, too, was watching Rachel. "Yeah. It's ok."

I saw the way he watched her. What had happened to them there? Why was brave, strong, fearless Rachel sobbing like the world had ended?

I saw Tobias, they way he hadn't said anything. His hawk face was expressionless, as always, so I had no idea what he was thinking.

And I saw Jake. Jake caught my eye and I could see that he, too, was confused and curious, and I thought we might be having the same problem: we could think of no way to ask the questions we had.

Rachel was suddenly done crying. She gently pushed me away from her, stood up and brushed herself off.

"I need to get out of these clothes." She said, and began walking towards the barn.

The female Helmet looked like she was about to say something, but the male shook his head. I guess he could sense that this was not the time for memory harvesting. From the looks of things, I didn't think she'd be getting anything from Rachel or Marco right now anyway.

Marco was watching Rachel as she walked away.

"So," he said. "What did we miss?"

Not nearly as much as it looks like we did. Tobias finally spoke.

Marco laughed. It sounded hollow. "Yeah," he admitted. "You're probably right there. I'm putting my foot down this time. Absolutely no more field trips through time. They never turn out well. I'm always getting chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex or blown apart by a cannon, or. . ."

Jake and I leaned in a little closer. What had started as a feeble joke was about to give some explanation as to what had happened to Marco and Rachel.

"Or shot by some crazy colonist." Marco finished.

Oh.

Rachel came out of the barn, dressed in fresh clothes and perfectly groomed. Not a trace of the dirt remained from where she had been sitting on the ground.

"So what did we miss?" She asked calmly. Karen held out the. . .thing. . .as an explanation. Rachel took it.

"It looks like Mickey Mouse." She said.

Marco reached out to try and take it from her. He had his hand on one of the "ears" of the Mickey Mouse when she tried to snatch it back. She had one "ear". He had the other. They both tugged, and both of the ears pulled apart from the main circle.

There was a small explosion and another flash of light (I was really getting sick of those) and Rachel and Marco were both blown back several feet.

"Oh great." Jake said as he rushed towards Marco. I went after Rachel.

I was pulling her to her feet. "What happened?" she muttered.

"Never mind, Rachel, just get up. . ."

"Rachel?" She said. "Why are you calling me. . .?"

Then she got a look at Marco several yards away. A panicked look flashed in her eyes. She looked down at herself.

Then, at the exact same moment, Marco and Rachel began to scream. . .


	17. Unexplained

Rachel

When I flew back and hit the ground, I was just thinking about how sucky my life was. Seriously. Not only have I been fighting an evil parasitical alien rave for the past two and a half years, but I'd been sent back in time with the most annoying guy ever.

And the most annoying guy ever had to go and throw himself in front of a bullet for me.

I didn't even want to think about what THAT meant.

And then, to top everything off, that stupid Mickey Mouse thing exploded when Marco tried to grab it from me.

Jake bent down and grabbed my arm to haul me back on me feet.

I felt awkward as I tried to get up. My body was kind of stiff. It felt a little weird.

"That was some fall you took, dude," Jake said, brushing me off.

Dude? Gee, thanks, Jake.

"Yeah—" I started to say, but my voice sounded funny. Too deep. I cleared my throat and tried again. "What happ-"

I stopped. Something was wrong. That was most definitely NOT my voice. In fact. . .I patted down my chest, arms, face. This was NOT my body. No boobs. No long hair. And there was more weight. Not fat, but my body was very slender. This one was stockier.

"What—" I started once again, but then I saw it. Her. ME! Getting pulled to her/my feet Cassie. If MY body was there, then. . .where was I?

I looked down. Oh, God, no. I recognized that colonial boy get up. I was. . .

I stopped thinking and started screaming.

But even that freaked me out. The scream wasn't mine.

"Marco! Marco, what's wrong?" Jake shook my. . .Marco's. . .shoulder.

"No!" I shook my head violently. Dark brown hair swung and brushed against my cheeks. "No, it's wrong, something's wrong! I'm not Marco!"

"What?" Jake looked at me like I was crazy. Which, since I was in Marco's body, I guess I very possibly was. Jake turned and looked at her/me. She/I was still screaming. "What are you talking about, man?"

"I'm not Marco!" I shrieked. It was almost comforting. Marco could get surprisingly high-pitched for a guy. "I'm just in this body! I'm really. . ." That's when it hit me. If I was in Marco's body, that could only mean one thing. I'd seen Freaky Friday. I knew how this worked.

"Oh, hell no." I muttered.

My body had stopped screaming. Her/my hand touched my face, arms, chest.

Lingered a little too long on my chest.

I shoved Jake aside and marched across Cassie's yard. I reached me. My body.

"Marco?" I asked myself.

"Rachel?"

Cassie looked back and forth between the two of us. So did Jake, who had followed me across the yard. Realization dawned on both of their faces.

And then, incredibly, they both started howling with laughter.

"This is not funny!" I shrieked. "Not funny! NOT FUNNY!"

I agree, said Ax, who had not said anything since I had come back from the Revolutionary War. Evidently even he had figured out what was going on. This situation is most serious.

"It's just—" Cassie gasped through her tears of laughter. "It's just that it's you—" Giggle "And—and—" Shriek of laughter "Marco!"

I ignored her. "Where did this thing come from?" I demanded from Ax, waving the Mickey Mouse ear in his face. I couldn't help noticing that the hand that held it was much browner and rougher than my own. "What IS this?"

Ax shrugged and pointed at the little redhead girl I hadn't even noticed was still around.

She looked at me warily.

"Where did you get this?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I don't know, I just came home from school, and it was on my bed. I thought the writing looked alien. I thought you all might know what it was."

"But—but how. . .how do I get out of THIS?" I gestured at Marco's body. I could feel panic rising in my throat. Marco's throat.

Ax had picked up the middle of the device. Perhaps if Rachel and Marco each take one of the circles and put them back the same way they pulled them apart, the effect would be reversed. 

Jake and Cassie were still laughing to hard to contribute opinions. Marco was still sitting on the ground, getting my clothes dirty. I held out my hand and pulled him to his feet. It was surprisingly easy. I guess that meant Marco was stronger than me. That REALLY sucked.

Marco was still holding the other Mickey Mouse ear. We tried putting the ears back in the way they had been before. Nothing happened. We waited. Still nothing. So we tried again. We switched ears. We put the ears in at the same time, we put them in slowly, we tried sticking them in place faster, we tried everything short of standing on our heads.

"This is a nightmare," I said, handing the device over to Ax so he could poke at it some more.

Marco had a funny look on his-my-face. "Uh, Tobias? I think you're sending that message to the wrong person."

Oh, Tobias said. Oops.

After several tries, we discovered it was impossible for Tobias to send private thought-speak to me. Everything went right to Marco.

"I think it's a mental thing," Cassie explained. "Tobias's mental image of Rachel is all screwed up. He pictures her as tall, blonde. Female. But right now, it's Marco that that's tall, blonde. And female. And Tobias knows that, so his mental picture of Rachel, and Marco too, are totally off. I bet we'll all have the same problem. But after a while, once we get used to it, we'll be able to get thought-speak right again."

"After a while!" Marco shrilled. I could practically hear my vocal cords straining. "I am NOT staying like this for a WHILE. I want my body back RIGHT NOW, before Rachel's body goes on the rag or something."

Apparently the thought of this was too much for Cassie and Jake. They both exploded back into giggles.

Perhaps there is a temporary solution, Ax said. Marco and Rachel can acquire and morph their own bodies. They will have to demorph and remorph regularly, but--

"Good enough!" I said. I grabbed Marco's—my—arm. It was way weird. I focused on. . .me. . .and tried to acquire.

Yes, tried. Because right when Marco should have been getting all drowsy from acquiring trance, I felt a zap like static electricity, only stronger, and yanked my hand away from Marco.

It seems the creator of this device foresaw that loophole.

"No shit." Marco rubbed his arm where I'd zapped him.

"There's got to be a way out of this," I moaned.

If we might suggest. . . said one of the giant Helmacron things. I still wasn't really sure why they were still around or why they had been here in the first place.

"Yes?" Cassie asked calmly.

Perhaps we can take the device with us back to the Iskoort home planet. They have encountered many species. There's a chance someone there may know who made your device, or even how the effects can be reversed.

"And you're just going to do this out of the goodness of your hearts?" Marco asked warily.

Well, no, said the alien. We do request a small payment for our services.

"What's that?"

Your memories from when you were in the past.

Jake had a considering face. "Half now, half later," he bargained. "You can take Marco's memories now and Rachel's when you get back."

After several more minutes of haggling, a deal was made. Jake's original offer stood, but in addition, if the aliens found out how to reverse the effects of the Mickey Mouse thing, we'd throw in a pint of blood from each of us, some of Ax's fur, and a raccoon leg Cassie's dad was about to amputate.

The raccoon leg was my idea, and what really sealed the deal. Bargaining can be a big part of shopping, and if there's one thing I know how to do, it's shop.

The aliens got back into their little spaceship and we watched them blast away from inside Cassie's barn.

"So who the fuck were they?" Marco asked.

http/ 


	18. Rejection and Revenge

Marco

You know, you'd think it'd be fun to have your own set of tits to play with, and then you get them and they're just. . .distracting.

But then again, I guess I couldn't really pass judgment. I hadn't actually had time to try them out yet.

I think Rachel suspected what I had on my mind. She was watching me pretty closely.

We were walking home together. We live in pretty much the same neighborhood. Jake does, too, but he decided to stay and "hang around" with Cassie.

Yeah. Right.

Ax and Tobias had gone back to Ax's scoop. I guess they were missing The OC, or so Ax accidentally gave away. Tobias tried to deny it, but I bought that about as much as I did Jake's story.

Rachel had originally been planning on flying home. I watched her getting more and more frustrated trying to morph for a while before finally saying, "Hey, Rachel? I don't have a bald eagle morph."

I guess ospreys are beneath her, because after that she decided to walk home.

I went with her to. . .ok, I have no idea. I knew it was going to be awkward. I mean, there was that whole, you know, dying-for-her thing a couple hours ago. That was bound to make things weird.

Or silent. Cause that's how it was. Silent.

But you know me. I'm the classic breaker-of-awkward-silences.

"So," I said. "How 'bout those Helmets?"

Rachel looked at me like I was insane. "What do you call your step-mother?"

That one threw me. "Uh, what?"

She rolled her eyes. "Your step-mother? The woman that married your dad? Our math teacher? What do you call her?"

"Oh. Uh, Nora."

"You know, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be to just listen to you talk like this. I can't believe such stupid things are coming out of MY mouth."

"Very funny." Wow, was that really the best comeback I had? "Uh, what are your sister's names?"

Yeah, Marco, way to sweep her off her feet with your wit.

Rachel smirked. "Sara and Jordan."

"Ok." I nodded.

More silence.

"What's the poodle's name?"

"Euclid."

"God, where did she think up THAT?"

I shrugged. More silence.

"Marco?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't ever treat me different because I'm a girl again."

I stared at Rachel. "What?"

"Look, chivalry's dead, ok? Next time I'm about to get shot, either take the guy down or let it happen. No more sacrificing yourself because you're a guy, and I'm a girl." She sighed. "Or I was, anyway."

I kept staring. Did she really think. . . "Rachel," I said. "That's not. . .I mean, I didn't. . ." God, was I really saying this? "I didn't do it because you're a girl."

Pause, and then. . .

Rachel grabbed my arm. Hard. "No," she hissed. "You're wrong. You did it because you were on some heroic chivalrous high or something, and that's all. That's all it's ever going to be. Got it?"

I got it. I pulled my arm away from her iron grip. We were at her house. "This is my stop." I said.

Rachel nodded. I turned to walk away.

"Marco?" she said sweetly before I could start up her driveway.

"What?"

"You touch ANYTHING, and I'll kill you."

Ha. Like she'd ever know. "Sure, Rachel." I said, and smiled big.

Rachel's room was spotless. I mean, seriously. I peeked in a closet. Everything hung up neatly. Nothing under the bed. Drawers perfectly organized.

It was killing me. I sat on the end of her bed, forcing myself not to mess anything up. I was starting to develop a twitch in my left eye.

Of course, that might not have entirely been because of Rachel's slowly-closing-in-on-me neatness. I was thinking about. . .well, there's getting shot down, and then there's what had just happened to me.

I mean, OUCH. You assume if you take a bullet for someone, there's at least going to be a "thank you".

But then, this IS Rachel I'm talking about. Normal rules don't really apply to her.

"Rachel!" Rachel's mom called upstairs. "If you want dinner, you better get your ass down here and eat it now!"

Have I ever mentioned Rachel and her mom are a lot alike?

Alright, I told myself as I headed downstairs. This is the big test. I'd dodged past Rachel's family on my way inside, but now it was the family dinner. I was going to have to smile. Make conversation. Be Rachel.

Actually, maybe I wasn't going to have to smile all that much.

I sat down at the kitchen table. There was a steaming bag of Chinese take out sitting in the middle of it. Rachel's oldest sister, stared at me. "That's MY seat." She said.

"Oh, uh, right, uh. . .sis." Damn. Which one was Sara, and which was Jordan?

Rachel's sister stared at me in even more confusion. Oops. Guess Rachel wasn't quite that nice to her sisters.

"Rachel, Jordan, be nice," Rachel's mom said distractedly, not even looking up from the folder she was going over. Ok. Jordan big, Sara little.

Jordan was about two years younger than Rachel and me, maybe twelve or thirteen. She didn't look much like Rachel, her hair was darker, she was shorter, her face was a tad more easy-going. Sara was around nine, and looked exactly like Rachel, miniaturized. She kind of scared me, actually. I hoped Rachel didn't baby-sit much.

Sara and Jordan talked through most of the meal with Rachel's mom adding in a "uh-huh" every now and then. I ate my food and tried to be inconspicuous.

I thought I was going to get away from the table without having to contribute anything to the conversation, and had in fact gotten up to throw away my paper plate when Jordan said, "Hey, Rachel, you got a phone call earlier."

It took me a minute to realize she was talking to me. "Yeah? From who?"

"Jake's friend. That Marco guy. The cute one."

Ah hah! At least SOMEONE in that family didn't think I was worthy of being crushed underfoot by an elephant stampede. "Ok, thanks." I told a bewildered Jordan. I guess Rachel really wasn't big on the please and thank you's.

I grabbed a cordless phone and took it up to Rachel's room. Then I sat on her bed and stared at it for a while. Did I REALLY want to call Rachel back?

Nah. What I REALLY wanted to do was strip naked and dance around in front of Rachel's full-length mirror.

After all, Rachel only said I couldn't TOUCH anything. She didn't say anything at all about looking.


	19. Spotless

--Rachel--

I stayed in Marco's room for most of the day. I didn't want to have to deal with his dad or stepmom.

Ok, and the dog kind of freaked me out.

For a while I just stood in the middle of the room not touching anything. I was trying not to notice the dirty clothes all over the floor. The unmade bed. The piles of comic books. The overflowing trash can.

It was starting to give me a twitch in my left eye. I did the only thing I could think of.

I cleaned Marco's room.

About three hours into the job, his dad came up to ask me if pizza was alright for dinner. Well, he started to ask anyway. Halfway through the question he trailed off into silence and just looked around the room in speechless wonder.

"Marco," he finally said after several minutes of staring. "Are you feeling all right?"

"Uh, yeah, Dad," I said, giving the desk one last swipe with the Swiffer duster sheet. "Why wouldn't I be?"

He sniffed the air. "Do I smell furniture polish?"

Ok, so maybe I went a little overboard with the cleaning. Obviously this was not going to work out. I called Marco. It took him over three hours to call me back.

I don't know what he was doing. Probably I didn't want to know.

By the time Marco called, his room was spotless. I had even been brave enough to go under the bed and in the closet.

"So what have you been up to?" I asked Marco.

"Not much," he said with my voice. "You?"

"I, uh, did some laundry," I admitted.

Silence on the other end. "You did what?"

"Laundry."

"How much?"

"Oh, a couple loads, I don't remember exactly..."

"Rachel."

"Ok, four."

Marco groaned. "Did my dad see you? That's going to cause some questions. I don't know if my dad even thinks I can do laundry. Well, just tell him that you heard a mouse and thought it would be a good idea to get everything off the floor, and the freakout from the mouse should distract him from--"

"Can you?" I interrupted.

"Can I what?"

"Do laundry."

"That's not the point."

"Oh my God! You can't do laundry! I can't believe it, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard!"

"I can do laundry!" Marco protested. "I just don't, because I have this issue with sorting. Somehow, something red manages to work its way into every load, and everything ends up pink. But I can do laundry. I totally did all the laundry in our house for almost two years."

"So for two years all your socks were pink?"

"Can we just let this go?"

I didn't want to let it go because, honestly, I was comfortable with the conversation. It was stupid teasing friends stuff. None of the weirdness from earlier. Teasing like this, I could almost forget what had happened.

Marco jumping between me and a gun. And to make it worse, I was pretty sure I knew why. I'd had a suspician before, but being in Marco's body, now I knew for sure.

Because Marco's body was attracted to my body. Waaay attracted to my body.

Do you have any idea how weird that is? Being attracted to yourself? That is good for a serious case of the shudders.

It also made me cranky. Cranky enough to try and scare Marco like I had when we walked home. Because Marco wasn't allowed to like me. Oh, he could joke about it. That was fine. Marco's a funny guy. But that he actually did...No way. Not right. That was setting himself up for a big hurt. So I tried to cut the whole thing off quick. Avoid the big hurt by causing a small one.

I think I was harsher than I wanted to be. But that's what you have to do. And anyway, he seemed to have bounced back pretty quickly.

So that's why it was hard for me to let the laundry-teasing go.

"So I guess if you don't do laundry, you probably don't polish the furniture."

Marco gasped. "Tell me you didn't."

"I'll take that as a 'No.'" I'd let him find out about his room later.

"Most definitely not. Oh well. Just tell my dad all the cleaning is an early Father's Day present. Father's Day is coming up soon, isn't it?"

"About two months."

"Oh. Close enough. So was there actually a reason you called me?"

"Well, there was going to be some bitching, but in the three hours it took you to call me back, I lost most of my steam."

Marco laughed. It creeped me out. His laugh was my laugh...and Marco's ears liked hearing my laugh. Liked it a lot. "Well, in that case, I need to get going. It's close to 11, you know. School tomorrow. But first, it's time for your shower."

"You wouldn't dare."

"Would you really prefer that I didn't?"

That was a little too good of a point. Would I rather have Marco see me naked, or let my body walk around without a shower?

I sighed and gave in to the inevitable. "Fine."

Marco giggled. "See you tomorrow, Marco," he cackled.

I hung up on him. Cassie called me five minutes later.

"You left Baby Think-It-Through in my barn," she growled.

I guessed the growling meant Baby Think-It-Through had been wanting some attention. "Did you take care of her?"

"No promises," she snarled and hung up.

It's a good example of just how annoying Robo-Baby was that it would have Cassie hanging up on me.

I sat at Marco's desk for a while, trying to delay bedtime. I was going to have to sleep in Marco's room. In Marco's pajamas. In Marco's bed.

But first I was going to have to take a shower. In Marco's body.

Marco's naked body.

In the bathroom, I kept my eyes closed as I undressed. _OK,_ I was thinking._ This isn't so bad. I'll just keep my eyes closed the entire time and--_

CLUNK. I ran into the sink.

It wasn't my bathroom. I couldn't remember where anything was. I was going to have to...open my eyes.

I opened one. Barely.

Oh, God, _WHY WERE THERE SO MANY MIRRORS_?

I jumped into the shower as fast as I could and closed my eyes again.

I didn't end up getting that clean because I didn't want to touch anything. It was unfortunate, because I really wanted to wash the 18th century off my skin. Marco's skin. Whatever.

It was definitely time for bed. I climbed in, too tired to even care that this was where Marco slept every night. Where Marco probably...well, let's just say that I found some very incriminating magazines when I was cleaning under the bed. Anyway, I was willing to try and forget about that when I realized that the bed smelled like Marco. Especially the pillow.

Two hours ago it would have been a major problem. Right now it was a minor annoyance. I dozed off before I had a chance to think about it too much.

And I had this dream.

In my dream, I was Marco. Really him, not just his body. I was seeing things through his perspective. His feelings, his thoughts, all of that.

_It was a couple months ago. Rachel had morphed a starfish and been split in half into Nice Rachel and Mean Rachel. Nice Rachel let it slip that she thought I was cute. _

_I wondered about that for a while. Nice Rachel was part of the real Rachel. If nice Rachel thought I was cute, and Nice Rachel liked me, then the real Rachel... _

_But I didn't let myself think about that..._

Marco's alarm went off at 7:00. I had to catch the bus at 7:20.

Seriously, who can get ready in 20 minutes?

Anyway, I lay in bed for a minute thinking about my dream (well, that and how I was going to miss the bus). It probably wasn't that weird of a dream. It probably just had to do with all the weird things that had been going on with me and Marco recently--getting blown back in time together, him taking that bullet for me, me realizing that he had a major crush on me, switching bodies...yeah, that stuff was bound to inspire some weird dreams.

There was one other nagging possibility. But it was just too horrible to even consider...


	20. Independent Woman

--Jake—

I'll admit, I was worried about how Rachel and Marco would handle the situation at school.

Turns out I definitely should have been.

I found Marco's body opening Rachel's locker first thing that morning.

"Uh, _Marco_? Marco? MARCO!"

Rachel finally realized I was talking to her. "Oh, hi, Jake."

"What are you doing in this locker?" I asked.

"Well, it's not like I was going to give him my combination," she said, rolling her eyes. "I'm getting my books for him."

"Oh. Have you seen him yet?"

"Nope. If you do, let me know I'm looking for him."

"Actually, I think you and I should stick together. You're my best friend and all, remember?"

Rachel raised one eyebrow at me. "Jake, you only have like five friends, and two aren't even human. I don't think anyone's going to think it's weird if they see you walking around by yourself."

"Low blow."

"Yeah, well--oh my God." Marco's face had a look I don't see very often. In fact, the last time I remembered seeing it was when we were 11 and I got mad at him and put his favorite comic book through my mom's paper shredder.

"What?"

"I'm going to kill him." Rachel said, very low and calmly.

I turned to see what she was looking at behind me.

It turned out we didn't have to look for Marco. He was coming down the hall right towards us.

Clad entirely in black leather.

Mini-skirt. Bustier. Knee-high boots. What looked suspiciously like a whip.

"Oh..."

I turned back to Rachel. She was breathing very heavily. "Rachel," I whispered urgently. "Don't do anything. I repeat: DO _NOT_--"

Before I could do anything, Rachel was running. I grabbed at her arm and missed, so I took off after her. Her target was pretty clear.

She tackled Marco in the middle of the crowded school hallway.

He went down, not surprisingly. The heels on those boots must have been three inches. Rachel must have been beyond fury at that point, because she was punching him. Punching him in her own face. I grabbed her shoulders and tried to pull her off, and she swung at me, too. There was a crowd gathering around us. This was bound to attract attention.

"MARCO!"

Oh, no. Anyone but...

Mr. Chapman. He used to be our assistant principal in middle school, but in the middle of our first year of high school he was promoted to dean of students of the high school. Which meant he took care of disciplinary matters. And broke up a lot of the fights.

He was also a Controller.

He helped me pull Rachel off Marco, then shoved her up against the locker since she was still fighting to get back at Marco. "Young man, you calm down RIGHT NOW. You are in a big heap of trouble, do you hear me? Attacking a girl in the middle of the hallway..."

Rachel calmed down, evidently realizing just how much trouble she was going to be in. Or, more specifically, how much trouble _Marco_ was going to be in.

Marco climbed slowly to his feet. "No, no, it's really ok, I'm fine!" He said, smiling brightly to show just how fine he was. The bloody nose kind of ruined the affect.

"Mr. Chapman," I said, talking fast. "Marco's bipolar, remember? He just forgot his medication today, and his condition is especially strong on, um...Tuesdays."

Marco looked at me like I was a moron. I winced when I realized what I said.

"Rachel, I'm surprised you're defending this young man."

"It was really my fault," Marco assured him. "I provoked him, it was all my fault. I knew he hadn't taken his medication. And that it was Tuesday." He added, definitely struggling not to sneer in my direction.

"All three of you in my office, now." He said, letting Rachel up off the locker but still keeping a hold on her arm. He more or less dragged her in the direction of his office. Marco and I trailed along behind him.

"Why the hell did you wear that?" I hissed at him as quietly as I could.

"Hey! Don't even try and blame this on me! I'm in dress code!"

I glared at Marco. "Do you even realize how serious this is? We really need to be keeping a low profile here. Was it really that important to you to try and piss her off?"

"Something you two want to share?" Mr. Chapman, asked, turning his head to look at us.

"Nope."

"No, sir." I said, shaking my head.

"Great." He lead us into his office. He steered Rachel towards a chair and handed Marco some tissues to clean up his bloody nose.

"Now," he said sternly. "We have a very serious situation here."

_You don't even know half of it,_ I thought. "Marco, you have attacked a young lady in the hallways."

Rachel bit her lip but didn't say anything.

"Rachel, you have been trying to defend the young man that attacked you."

Marco fidgeted.

"Now, I've been working with young people for a long time. I know an abusive relationship when I see one."

A vein popped out on Rachel's forehead, but she managed to keep silent.

"I am very upset with all of you. Marco, I'm going to have to report this to the police."

"No!" Marco protested.

"Now, Rachel," Mr. Chapman said, turning to him. "I am very disappointed that not only would you not report this abuse, but that you would defend your attacker. I always thought you prided yourself on being very independent."

"I--" Marco started.

"I have the names of several counselors of abused women. I'm going to recommend you be sent to one of them."

"I am NOT an abused woman!" Marco yelled.

Mr. Chapman patted him on his shoulder reassuringly. "Don't worry. The counselors can help."

The he turned on me. "Now, Jake, I realize you may have been in a difficult position here, caught between your cousin and your friend."

"Uh..." Where the hell was he going with this?

"But that does not justify trying to cover up your friend's abuse. I hope you understand how serious this is."

"There was no abuse." I said stubbornly. "Marco just forgot his medication."

"Yeah," Rachel agreed. "My medication. This is definitely not an abusive relationship. It's not a relationship at all."

Mr. Chapman shook his head pityingly.

Rachel and Marco both had to talk to the police. The end result was that Marco was suspended for two weeks. It would have been a lot longer, but he had nothing prior, and "Rachel" had kept repeating that it was her fault and she had started the whole thing. Rachel, by the way, was going to be going to the abused woman's counselor.

And I got a month's worth of detention for not reporting the case of abuse earlier.

Overall, I was NOT happy with my friends.


	21. Madame Kinka's

Marco's dad yelled at me for approximately two hours when he came and picked me up from the school. In addition to the punishments Mr. Chapman and the police had given Marco, he was also going to be grounded for three months and seeing a therapist. I had to sneak the cordless phone from the living room to call Cassie.

"How's Baby Think-It-Through?" I whispered from my hiding place--Marco's closet.

"In my closet," Cassie admitted.

I sighed. "There goes my home ec grade. This is turning out to be a wonderful day. I didn't think anything could top yesterday, when I was assigned a project with Marco, sent back in time, shot, and lost my body. Today is really making an effort, though."

"Yeah," Cassie agreed. "It really hasn't been a good week for you. Although, you have to admit, it is kind of funny to imagine Marco going to the mall and buying a leather mini skirt and bustier. Even if he was in your body."

"Well, actually," I began, but then reconsidered. "Yeah, it is funny. To imagine Marco shopping at Madame Kinka's House of--I mean, wherever you would buy an outfit like that."

"Jake wanted me to tell you there's a meeting tonight at the barn tonight, eleven o'clock. We're going to discuss the situation with you and Marco."

I sighed. "What's left to discuss? We're screwed until those Helmet freaks get back with some good news."

Cassie laughed. "Not the stuck-in-each-other's-bodies situation. The hating-each-other problem. Rachel, what happened to you guys?"

"Why do we have to have a meeting about that? It's not Jake's business if Marco and I don't get along," I avoided the question.

"You know what happened today is _everyone's_ business," Cassie explained patiently. "If you two are fighting this bad...Chapman got involved today. We can't afford to be causing any scenes, especially in front of Controllers."

"I know," I admitted. "But today was just bad. Things are a little weird right now between me and Marco."

"Rachel," Cassie began in her gentle way. "Does this have anything to do with--I mean, do you realize...Marco--"

"No," I cut her off. "We are not going there."

"But--"

"Cassie, you are my best friend and I love you, so you have to understand that...it's nothing. There is nothing."

"Rachel, he--"

I hung up the phone.

At about midnight, I opened Marco's window, morphed to osprey (seriously, though, they have nothing on bald eagles) and flew to Cassie's barn. Everyone else was already there, which wasn't surprising--I was the only one that was grounded until the end of the school year and had to wait extra-long for Marco's dad and stepmother to to go to bed because they stayed up late discussing "what went wrong" with me. I mean, Marco.

Ax, in his human morph, was trying to get a grasp on the situation.

"I am confused by what happened today," he was saying. "What was inappropriate about the outfit Marco wore?"

"Technically, nothing," Jake said. "It's just not the type of thing girls usually wear to school."

"Clothing is so confusing. I do not understand all the rules behind it. What was wrong with this outfit?"

"Well," Jake began, with the type of look that parents have when they're regretting their decision to have children, "As a rule, you just don't go to school in black leather skirts, corsets, and--"

(HE WORE OUR OUTFIT?) Tobias exclaimed in horror.

Silence. Dead silence as everyone either turned to stare at Tobias, up in the rafters, or me, currently mid demorph.

(I mean...) Tobias began, probably in an attempt to correct what he had said, but trailed off when he realized there was no saving the situation.

Jake cleared his throat. "Ok," he squeaked in a slightly-higher-than-usual voice. "Back to business. Rachel and Tobias--I mean, Rachel and Marco. The issues."

The silence returned.

"Alright, I guess I'll start," Jake began, trying to sound serious, but still sounding pre-pubescent. "Cassie has found a very serious new problem, and we need everyone one hundred percent to be committed to our mission--no distractions."

"What is the problem? Prob. Lem. Problem," Ax asked.

Cassie sighed. She looked more upset than I'd seen her in a while.

"I went to the elementary school today with my mom," she said. "She was doing a thing on wildlife for the kids, and I was helping her out. I ran into Chapman there."

Marco groaned.

Cassie ignored him. "He's setting up an elementary school version of the Sharing. He said that recent events at the high school today led him to realize the seriousness of today's troubled youth--and that it can be possibly prevented in the next generation by reaching out to younger children."

Everyone turned to stare at Marco and I again.

And here I was thinking that the day couldn't get any worse.

Marco looked as horrified as I felt. "You really think they're going after kids because of me and Rachel?" he asked.

"No," Jake admitted. "They've probably been planning this for a while. But you guys have given them a great example of why the school 'needs' a program to 'better our youth' or whatever. And we're going to need to go after this hard and fast--we cannot afford to be distracted by this thing between you two."

Marco and I nodded obediently.

"Good," Jake said. "Now, Cassie also noticed some construction going on at the school. Supposedly there's some plumbing issues, but we think they might actually be building a Yeerk pool entrance."

I was starting to feel nauseous.

"We need two people to go in and check things out."

"I'll do it," I volunteered.

"Me too," Marco agreed, nodding his head so that his (_MY!_) blonde hair shimmered in the moonlight coming in through the window. My stomach tingled pleasantly.

Oh god. I was trapped inside a body that was strongly attracted to my actual body. This was so not happening.

"Yeah, right," Jake said. "Like I'm actually going to send the two of you in there alone together. We might as well just go turn ourselves in right now."

"Has he gotten more sarcastic than usual?" Marco asked.

(I'll go with Rachel,) Tobias said. _Tobias_. I couldn't read the tone of his thoughtspeach. Did he misinterpret what was going on? Whatever _was_ going on? Did he think that Marco's stupid crush could actually mean something to me? Because no matter how many times Marco threw himself in front of bullets for me, it was never going to come between me and Tobias. And the fact that I had all but forgotten that Tobias was up there in the rafters was just because everything was so nuts. And probably Marco's body didn't think about Tobias all that much. At least I hoped not.

"Great," I agreed, and smiled up at Tobias until I realized that it probably didn't mean very much coming from Marco's face. I stopped smiling.

We made arrangements for meeting tomorrow, after Tobias and I had checked out the school, and then Jake, Tobias, and Ax wandered off while Cassie brought out Baby Think-It-Through.

"It's definitely your turn," Marco said. He may have even been right. I couldn't remember, but I still shook my head no.

"I'm skipping last period tomorrow to check out the school with Tobias, remember?"

Marco groaned, but packed up Baby Think-It-Through and her diaper bag and took off for the long walk home. I stayed behind to hang out with Cassie.

"Rachel, I know you don't want to talk about this but--" Cassie began.

"I just remembered, I have to do some laundry," I cut her off. I jumped off a hay bale and took off after Marco. "See you tomorrow!" I yelled over my shoulder.

"What was that about?" Marco asked when I caught up to him. I didn't answer. "Oh," he nodded. "You're still mad about the outfit."

"You think?"

Marco shrugged. "Well, I found it under your bed and I just couldn't resist trying it on..."

"Thanks, Marco. You know, I found your pornos under your bed, but it's not like I brought those to school."

Marco cringed. "Yeah, you're right. It was a really stupid thing to do. But Rachel...I know this is a weird reason, but I think I wanted to make you mad at me. Hate me."

No. What was actually weird, I realized, was that I didn't. Hate him. And I really should have. I was probably going to be known as the Dominatrix for the rest of high school.

But Marco wasn't done. "I wanted to make you hate me because I thought it would be easier for everyone. Because lately I've started to feel like I--"

But before he could finish his sentenece I, for the second time that day, hauled off and punched Marco in the face. He fell over and landed in the dirt, Baby Think-It-Through and her accessories scattering around him.

"GOD DAMN IT, RACHEL!" he shrieked. "What the hell was that for?"

"I don't want to hear it!" I exclaimed in frustration. "I don't want to deal with this!"

"Deal with what?"

"With you!"

Marco avoided my eyes and picked up Baby Think-It-Through's plastic bottle to dust it off.

And then I did the stupidest, weirdest, most unexplainable thing in my entire life.

I knelt down in the dirt next to Marco, threw my arms around him and kissed him.

--

--So, I'm back! And, in case people are wondering, yes, I DO plan to finish this story! And then, once it is actually completed, with an actual ending, I plan on going back and doing a big overhaul and fixing all the weird things I did when I was 14 and started this story. So I do plan on updating again very soon, but I just want to let you know that I am a huge review whore. I love reviews. And I know it might not seem like it, but whenever I get people asking me to update, it really does motivate me. If people hadn't kept asking me to finish this story, I probably would have given it up years ago. So lots of love, and let me know which parts you liked/disliked. Catty


	22. The Kiss

I saw Rachel's face--my face--coming at me, and had no idea how to react. I mean, I was about to kiss _myself_ in a weird way. In the weirdest way. I definitely didn't back off though, because there was a voice in the back of my head reminding me that it was Rachel controlling that body--the one that was about to kiss me. And I had been waiting to kiss Rachel for a very long time. I would have kissed Rachel no matter whose body she was in--Cassie, Jake, Ax...possibly even her grizzly morph.

Turns out I didn't get much of a chance, though. The second her mouth touched mine, there was a flash of light and I felt my self flying through the air. Again.

I landed with a splash in--what else--a mud puddle. But as I looked down, I noticed something. I wasn't wearing the girly jeans and fitted t-shirt I had been before. I was wearing baggy khaki's and a sweater. The clothes _Rachel_ had been wearing. The clothes my body had been wearing.

No. It was too good to be true. It couldn't have been that easy.

I looked up. Rachel was about ten feet away from me, picking herself up from the--of course--soft patch of grass she had landed in.

_Rachel_. Blonde hair, blue eyes, amazing body (trust me, I checked).

"Well," she said, brushing imaginary dirt off her clothes. "That's a relief."

"Did you know that was going to happen?" I asked as I climbed out of the mud puddle.

"No," she admitted.

"Then..."

Rachel shrugged. "That was your body. Your hormones. Not me."

"But..."

"Let's just pretend it never happened, ok? It was a mistake. A fluke, actually. A result of alien forces butting into our lives, as usual, and it would never have happened under ordinary circumstances. And if you know what's good for you, you will never mention it again because--"

But Rachel was cut off because I, not wanting to lose whatever moment there possibly could be (even if it was created by alien forces) grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her.

And let me tell you, it was a great kiss. All three and a half seconds of it before Rachel shoved me back and slapped me so hard my head swung to the side possibly fast enough to give me whiplash.

I really wished she would stop hitting me. That made the third time in one day.

Rachel stared at me in shock and possibly horror, and I knew why. It was because in those three and a half seconds before she shoved me away, she had been kissing me back.

And she definitely couldn't blame it on _my_ hormones this time.

"Oh my God, this is not happening..." Rachel groaned before she started to morph to owl.

"Rachel, wait," I begged as she continued to morph. "Rachel, this _is_ happening...RACHEL!" I gave one last yell as she flew off, leaving me and Baby Think-It-Through alone.

Baby Think-It-Through started to cry. I briefly considered joining her. Instead, I changed her damn diaper, loaded her up, and walked home.

When I got there I almost had a heart attack. My room was cleaner than it'd been in...ok, ever. I had never seen my room that clean. I had actually forgotten that I had blue carpet.

I opened a drawer. Turns out Rachel had assigned it as my underwear drawer. Before, all of my clean underwear had been in the laundry basket with all my other clean clothes. The dirty underwear had been on the floor with all the rest of my dirty clothes. My drawers had been full of...well, junk. Now I had an underwear drawer. And she had actually folded all of my boxers and stacked them neatly.

By color. I kid you not, my underwear was stacked in ROY G BIV order.

All of my sweaters, dress shirts, and dress pants were hung neatly in the closet. All of my books were in alphabetical order on the bookshelves that had previously displayed my collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer action figures (now Buffy and her gang were nowhere to be seen). The bed was made, and clothes for the next day were waiting on my desk chair.

I checked under the bed. She had even organized my porn magazines--first in alphabetical by the name of the magazine, and then by order of release.

I changed out of my muddy clothes and into some fuzzy flannel pajama bottoms and a t-shirt (after I found them--it really wasn't that hard, turns out I had a "pajamas" drawer, too) and climbed into bed. I couldn't sleep, though. I needed to talk to someone about this--someone that could explain Rachel to me.

There as obviously only one person to go to.

I climbed out of bed, morphed to bat, and flew to Cassie's house. I landed on her window ledge and was about to thought-speak to her to let me in, when I heard voices.

Two voices. Both female. One, patient and understanding, was definitely Cassie. The other, angry and frustrated, had to be Rachel.

I leaned my little bat body closer to the window to hear what they were saying.

"Rachel, calm down," Cassie said. "What happened? I mean, you're back in your own body! That's good news, right?"

Rachel let out a frustrated grunt. "If I tell you, you have to promise me two things."

"What?"

"You can never tell anyone, and you have to promise not to laugh at me."

Ouch. Laugh? This isn't funny! This is passion! This is intensity! This is...woah, deja vu.

"I promise," Cassie said seriously.

"Ok," Rachel took a deep breath like she was Peter Pettigrew preparing to hack off her own hand. Come on, was it really _that_ shameful to have kissed me? I mean, ok, she _did_ have Tobias, but still. We're 16. It's not like this is something hugely uncommon. "I kissed Marco. I mean...he kissed me. I mean, we kissed."

"Woah!" Cassie exclaimed.

"But then I hit him!" Rachel added quickly.

"Hmmm," Cassie said thoughtfully.

"What do you think?" Rachel asked. "Is it a big deal? What does it mean? Should I tell him?"

Tell me? Tell me what? Oh...she means Tobias. I felt a sinking sensation in the pit of my bat stomach. Was Rachel going to tell Tobias? Cause if she did, I could see that ending with a red-tailed hawk dive-bombing my head. Or maybe he would go all out, morph to Andalite, and just decapitate me.

"Rachel, what happened with you and Marco when you guys were in the past? I still haven't heard much about that."

"Oh..." Rachel mumbled. "It's not that big of a deal. I, uh, upset this guy and he came after me with a gun."

"And that's how you two died? He shot you both?"

Rachel sighed. "Yeah, that's basically it. Except, um, he wasn't going to shoot Marco, just me. But then...Marco jumped in front of him."

I heard Cassie's soft gasp. "And that's why Marco came back first?"

"Yeah," Rachel admitted. "We didn't know that we had to die to come back, you know? And so he shot Marco...and he was just laying there. And I could tell he was dead, and I didn't know what to do. So when he lifted up his gun to shoot me...I just waited. And..." I heard Rachel's voice break, like maybe she was trying not to cry. "I _wanted_ him to shoot me. Because there was this guy, and he tried...he tried to..." A definite sob.

This was the third time in a week I had witnessed Rachel crying. A big surprise considering that up until this week, I wasn't even sure she had tear ducts. What was also surprising was how much I wished I could make everything better for her. Because, while it was a relief to know that Rachel was, in fact, human, it was scaring me a little to realize how much her pain caused me pain.

"It's ok, Rachel," Cassie began, but Rachel cut her off.

"No, it is NOT ok!" she yelled, and Cassie didn't even shush her so she wouldn't wake up her parents. "Some asshole tried to rape me while I was stuck in time-travel hell, and I killed him. And then, when his brother came after me, he killed the only friend I had with me. And that was the first time in my life I have ever just wanted to _die_."

There was silence between Rachel and Cassie. Me, I could feel my heart (even if it was 100 bat) twisting painfully at Rachel's confession. I wanted to hold her and take away all the bad stuff she was feeling...

Oh my God, I am so far gone.

"I think you should tell Tobias," Cassie said finally.

And I had been coming to ask her for advice? What the hell had I been thinking? She gave the worst advice ever! Tell Tobias?! Did Cassie want me dead or something?

"You should tell Tobias," Cassie continued, "Everything you just told me, and I think he'll understand."

Rachel snorted. "How could he understand? I don't even understand."

"Obviously you have just had an unbelievably upsetting ordeal, and Marco was the one who was there with you," Cassie explained. "We all know Marco has feelings for you--"

"Wait," Rachel interrupted. "You _all_ know?"

Exactly what I was thinking. I mean, yeah, I had always joked about it, but even I hadn't realized what I felt about Rachel until that day (was it really only two days ago?) I had sat in Home Ec, wishing so hard that the teacher would call my name as her partner.

"Of course everyone knows," Cassie said. "I mean, maybe we didn't all see him jump in front of a bullet for you, but I don't think anyone would be that surprised that he did. Anyway, you know how Marco feels about you. And you were emotionally broken up, and then he sacrificed himself to try and save you...It's natural that you'd feel some sort of connection with him."

"And you think Tobias will understand that?"

I didn't wait to hear Cassie's explanation, though. I flew away from the window and towards home, my little bat heart breaking into pieces the entire way.

Of course that was what had happened. Those three and a half seconds of kissing had all been the result of Rachel's traumatic experience. I had been her weak moment. Her mistake.

I got back to my room to the unwelcome sound of Baby Think-It-Through crying at the top of her artificial lungs. I wanted to drown her in the bathtub, but managed to control myself enough to feed her until she stopped crying. I had just climbed back into my bed when I heard a tapping at my window.

I groaned and walked over to the window. A great horned owl was perched in the window box my stepmother had planted with marigolds that had just started to sprout up.

"Cassie?" I asked, figuring she was there to warn me to watch the skies for homicidal hawks. Of course, it was mostly her fault that I was going to have to keep one eye to the sky.

(No,) Rachel said.

I opened the window and she hopped inside and on top of my dresser. Which, now that I was looking at it, seemed especially shiny and dust-free. "What are you doing here?" I asked her. She didn't respond, just started to demorph.

"Look if you're here to try and let me down gently or something, you don't have to bother," I said. I had to stare at the floor. For some reason, I couldn't look at her as I said this. "I went to Cassie's tonight to talk to her, and I overheard you guys. I know that I was just taking advantage of what happened when we were back in time. I know you don't care about me at all."

"You heard that?" Rachel asked in surprise once she had finished her demorph.

"Yeah," I nodded.

She nodded too. "Ok, then," she said. "But that's not why I'm here."

Rachel moved closer to me, slowly at first, but then all of a sudden there was no distance between us. Before I could even stop to wonder what she was doing, she was kissing me again--but this time, _really_ kissing me. Her arms were around me, pulling us as tightly together as possible, and her tongue was brushing my lips, trying to get into my mouth. Before I could worry about the fact that I had no idea what I was doing, I had opened my mouth and our tongues were together and half of my brain was worrying that she could tell I had never done this before (unless you counted Rebecca, who had refused to pry her lips apart because, quite possibly, French kissing hadn't been invented yet), even though the other half was too deliriously happy and crazy-dizzy to think anything at all.

Rachel's hands were roaming down my back, and then they were under my t-shirt. I pulled back in surprise.

"What?" she asked.

"I just...I mean..." I stammered, fully aware of how lame I sounded. The first time a girl had ever made an attempt to get under my clothes, and I was questioning her motives. "What's going on? Cassie said--"

"Cassie was wrong," Rachel cut me off, and pushed me down onto my bed.

Rachel climbed onto my bed with me, and then she was laying on top of me and kissing me again. This time, when she went to pull my shirt off, I didn't stop her. I was too nervous to try and take hers off, but she did it for me. _This has to be a dream_, I couldn't help thinking as she continued to kiss me. But then, there was no way I could be imagining all of these details--the softness of her hair and skin, the scratchiness of the lace on her bra, the cinnamon taste of her mouth. And most of all, the overwhelming heat that was coming from her. I could feel it everywhere our bare skin was touching--it was making me dizzy.

It also made me brave. Brave enough to slide my hands up her back to the fastening on her bra. I waited for her to slap me, and when she didn't, I unfastened it. By some miracle (or the hours I had spent practicing on a bra I bought from JC Penney's when I was 13) it unhooked easily, and she allowed me to pull it off her.

And ok, granted, there was nothing I hadn't seen before, but trust me, it was a completely different experience from this perspective.

Rachel pressed herself against me, and I savored the feeling of her bare chest against mine. She kissed my neck as her hands slid down my stomach and began untying the drawstring on my pajama bottoms.

"Rachel?"

"Yeah?" She asked, sitting up a little so she could see my face.

If this was really going to happen, then there was something I needed to say first. I know it seems incredibly...well..._girly_, but for some reason I had to get it out there.

"I lo--"

"Waaaaaaaaahn. Waaaaaaaaahn."

Rachel and I both groaned.

"They programmed it to do that," I said.

"There's no other explanation," she agreed as she climbed off me and reached for the doll.

There was a knock on my door. "Marco, if you don't shut that doll up, Nora and I will do it for you!" my dad threatened. The knob started turning.

Rachel's eyes went wide. She grabbed her shirt and bra and dove into my closet a millisecond before my dad entered the room. I grabbed my comforter and pulled it over my lap so my dad wouldn't see anything suspicious. Not to mention extremely embarrassing.

"Uh, hi, Dad," I said, hoping my face wasn't as bright red as it felt.

My dad walked into my room and sat down on my bed. "Marco," he began, and I could tell this was going to get very bad very quickly. "Nora was telling my about this Baby Stop-And-Think--"

"Baby Think-It-Through."

"Oh, right. Anyway, it seems like a very good program your school has going on, but it's made me think. Now, I know you haven't been very active with girls yet..." My head was about to explode from the shear irony of it all. "But I think that day is probably coming soon, and I wanted to make sure you didn't have any questions."

"Questions?" I said. My voice cracked slightly.

"About sex. Particularly methods of protection against STD's and pregnancy, but if you have any questions about the mechanics of things, I'd be happy to answer those as well."

Oh, god. I was going to die. Rachel was witnessing me having The Talk. At _five o'clock in the damn morning_. What the hell was wrong with my dad?

"You do have the basic idea of things, right?" he asked.

"Uh, yeah," I said. "I took biology last year, you know..."

"You only got a C," Dad reminded me.

"Well, that was the one part of the class I stayed awake for."

Dad grinned. "Ah, like father like son," he said. "You know, your dad was quite the stud back in his day. Don't tell Nora, but she wasn't the only date I ever got from those parent-teacher conferences..."

_Why?_ WHY?

"Also," Dad said, turning more serious. "I want to know what really happened between you and that girl yesterday. That cousin of Jake's."

"Oooh...I thought I explained everything yesterday."

"Well, I thought maybe there was some stuff you didn't want to tell the police or say in front of Nora...Were you dating her?"

"No."

"Well," Dad said awkwardly. "We've decided that it'd probably be best if you spoke to a counselor." I had seen that one coming. "We found an excellent one. You'll be visiting her at nine in the morning every day of your suspension, and probably for a little while afterwards too, depending on how things go."

"That's fine, Dad. Uh, I promise I'll keep Baby Think-It-Through quiet, but I could really use some sleep." I lied.

Dad smiled at me kind of sadly. "Ok, Marco. Good night." He left the room.

Rachel came out of the closet. Unfortunately, she had put her shirt back on. "Did I mention I'm sorry about getting you suspended for two weeks?"

I shrugged. If it had in any way led to this night, it was more than worth it.

Rachel sat down on the bed next to me. "Before we do anything else, I need to think about some things, ok?"

I nodded. So did I. I'd never done the whole affair-with-your-buddy's-girlfriend thing before. If that's what this was. It was a good thing she'd decided to stop and think things over. At least, that's what I kept trying to convince myself.

Rachel and I sat next to each other in silence for a while, until she finally said, "I'll talk to you tomorrow." Before she left, she kissed me quickly on the lips.

That had to mean something. Right?


	23. Kicking Ass

**Rachel**

"You messed up," Cassie had told me. "You did something you never would have because of extreme circumstances. Tobias will understand that you never wanted to kiss Marco--it just happened."

It was a good explanation. Probably I could have convinced Tobias. Cassie knew me better than anyone, and she seemed to really believe it. She seemed so sure that I couldn't bring myself to ask her the question I had: What if it was more than that? What if extreme circumstances hadn't twisted my view of Marco; what if they had just allowed me to see things I hadn't before?

What if I just honestly _liked_ Marco?

Ok, it was a scary thought. Right up there with learning aliens had invaded the world, for a couple of reasons. The first was that I already had a boyfriend. A wonderful boyfriend that would be incredibly crushed if he found out. The second was that...well, _Marco_. I would never live that down.

Could I really be attracted to Marco? He was short, he was a dork, and he could be cold. Cold in a calculating point A to point B with no concerns for anything in between way. He annoyed me. He _really_ annoyed me.

But then...ok, he was cute. I could admit that, right? Not that it was important, but, you know, it was true. And he was funny. Really funny--he could make people laugh in the worst situations. And if he was ruthless, I was probably a million times worse than he was because everyone knew I enjoyed the war. Marco could get from point A to point B, but I not only could get there, I enjoyed the ride.

And I knew that Marco, in his own way...he could be nice, too. Maybe he didn't do it the same way other people (ie, Tobias) did, but he could be kind. And you know, I actually liked and respected that he didn't go out of his way to do it all the time. I was like that myself, actually.

So maybe it was possible that I could, in some alternate universe, like Marco.

But did I?

There were some signs. First of all, I had obviously kissed him. I don't know why--it was a weird situation and I can't even begin to understand my own motives. Part of it had been because his body had this unbelievable nagging desire to do it--in fact, if Marco resisted that all day every day, then I can add "strong self control" to his list of attributes, because I had given in after all of a day and a half. But that couldn't be the only reason, because I had known, clearly, that despite the body swap, I was Rachel and I was kissing Marco.

And then, after that, when we were in our own bodies and he had kissed me...

I thought about these things as I flew home from Cassie's house. Cassie's explanation made sense--in fact, how could I even know for sure if what I felt when Marco kissed me had been real or just the twisted result of what had happened the day before?

Maybe there was a way to find out.

I flew to Marco's house.

I didn't plan for things to go as far as they did. It was supposed to be one kiss--an experiment, more than anything. I didn't think that once I started kissing Marco, it would be really hard to stop.

Because I knew, after that first kiss, that Cassie must have been wrong. This was more than what had happened in the past two days. This was years of looking and flirting and teasing and wondering all combined.

I wasn't sure if maybe, somewhere _very_ deep down, I had always liked Marco. Was this new, or just me realizing it for the first time? I just knew that when I was kissing Marco, I had this overwhelming desire to get as close to him as possible.

And that was how I had come frighteningly close to having sex with Marco.

Luckily, I guess, his dad had came in and interrupted us. Sitting in the closet had centered me a little bit--I had a boyfriend. Marco was not that boyfriend. Therefore, I should not have sex with Marco. It was all very logical, actually. I should get out of the closet, tell Marco it had all been a mistake, threaten to kill him in his sleep if he told anyone, and leave.

When Marco's dad left and I could get out of the closet, I didn't do any of those things.

Well, ok, I did leave. But I didn't tell Marco that it had been a mistake. I told him I had to think some things over. Which was, actually, an understatement. I had to think _everything_ over. What was going on with me? Did I feel any differently about Tobias than I had two days ago? No. I was staying with Tobias. What had happened with Marco was a mistake. Yeah, maybe I had some strange feelings for him now, but I was just going to have to ignore those until they went away. Which they would. They had to. Because I was _meant_ to be with Tobias. And Marco...well, Marco was probably meant to be with his porn magazines.

But for some reason, I hadn't told Marco that this could never happen again. No, the words that had come out of my mouth had definitely been "Before we do anything else...", which implied that somewhere in my mind I wasn't planning on staying away from Marco.

I morphed back to owl and flew home where I got a full hour of sleep before my alarm went off. As I was getting ready, I realized that, since I was Rachel again, I was no longer suspended for two weeks. I had to go to school. Which meant that...Marco was going to have to go with Tobias to check out the elementary school.

Shit.

I called Marco and informed him of the situation. "Uh, I'm guessing you don't want me to say anything to Tobias about...?"

"Yeah," I said. "Unless you want to die, of course. Then, by all means, go ahead. Tell Tobias. If he doesn't manage to kill you, I will."

"I figured," Marco said. "But, since you're the one going to school now, don't you think you should stop by and pick up Baby Think-It-Through?"

Marco's house was actually on my way to school, so I walked there to pick up Baby Think-It-Through (Marco, for some unexplainable reason, had started calling her Mildred), then caught the bus at the corner.

My morning was pretty uneventful, except that I found a faux-leather whip shoved through the vents of my locker, and several guys asked me how much I charged per hour. I would have disemboweled them and joined Marco in Suspensionland, but Jake and Cassie were following me around (probably for exactly that reason) and managed to hold me back.

Cassie had told Jake about the whole body switch-back, and fortunately he didn't ask too many questions. I felt a little guilty about not explaining the entire situation, but Jake seemed to think it was just some kind of weird fluke--an alien device used to temporarily switch bodies for whatever alien reason. I was more suspicious--it seemed too likely that whoever had left it had it out for us. Maybe someone was trying to destroy the Animorphs from the inside out.

"Marco and Tobias should be letting us know what they found out soon," Jake said at lunch. The three of us were sitting together and trying to sound like we were making small talk, when really we were possibly discussing the fate of the world.

Cassie and I nodded. Cassie was trying to finish up some math homework. I hadn't had time to pack myself a lunch since I'd stopped by Marco's, so I was trying to pick out the most-wilted bits of lettuce from the school salad I had bought and putting them on my napkin. Jake was munching a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with one hand and proofreading through an essay with the other.

Sometimes, in moments like this, I almost feel normal.

"How long do you have to carry that thing around?" Cassie asked, pointing at Baby Think-It-Through/Mildred (who had her own chair next to me) with her pencil.

"Until Tuesday," I said, squeezing some Italian dressing out of its packet and onto my salad.

"Marco's going to be suspended that entire time," Cassie pointed out. "Is he going to get part of the grade?"

"Yeah, he is," Jake answered her. "They're letting him do all of his work. I'm taking all of his assignments to him."

"He's in charge of the baby log," I added.

"The what?" Cassie and Jake asked together. Neither of them had been stupid enough to sign up for home ec. Jake had gym as an elective, and Cassie was taking a computer class (I suspected Ax was doing most of her homework, but she wouldn't admit to it).

"Baby log. Basically, it's a record of who was taking care of the baby for how long. You'll actually be in it, Cassie, as a baby-sitter."

"You might want to leave out that Cassie locked her in a closet," Jake suggested.

"Don't baby-sitters usually get paid?" Cassie asked, looking up from her math.

(Guys,) Tobias's thought speak voice saved me from having to answer (or pay) Cassie. I looked out the window we were sitting next to. I could just make out an osprey, a northern harrier, and a red-tailed hawk sitting in a tree outside. (We have a problem.)

Cassie and Jake put down their pencils.

(We checked out the elementary school,) Marco took over. (We saw lots of new signs for the Sharing, but we don't think they're going to be using it to get to the kids. We think the Sharing is an excuse to draw in the parents--meetings about raising kids the right way and all. They're not bothering with convincing the kids. The teachers must all be infested already, because they've already started taking full classes down to the Pool.)

Cassie gasped.

(We need to stop it now,) Tobias added. (There's no time--if we wait any longer, they'll have the entire school.)

"Sara?" I said, hoping one of them could read my lips. My youngest sister was in the 4th grade. At that elementary school.

(They started with the younger grades,) Marco answered me. (She's ok. For now.)

Jake grabbed three of Cassie's French fries and broke one in half, then held them in his hand so they all looked the same. Cassie and I stared at him.

"Short fry goes with them," Jake said.

"What happened to _'We all need to be on this 100 percent_'?" I hissed at him.

"We do," Jake whispered back. "In this case, though, two of us need to stay behind. We cannot draw any more attention or we're all dead. You know this, Rachel. _No arguing_."

I gritted my teeth, but grabbed a french fry without any more protest. It was long. Cassie pulled a long one, too.

Jake handed me his essay. "Hand this in for me next hour, will you?" He asked, threw away his trash, and left.

"What do you think they're going to do?" Cassie finally asked after we'd been sitting in silence for several minutes.

I shrugged. Picked at my salad some more. "I went over to Marco's last night," I blurted out.

Cassie raised her eyebrows. "What did you do?"

"Uh...seduced him?"

"_What_?"

I gave Cassie a brief summary of the almost-sex incident.

Cassie considered my story.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked her, not liking the frustrated look on her face.

"Mostly that I was wrong about your thing with Marco," she admitted. "I didn't think it would go any farther than that one kiss. And I'm not wrong very often. Actually, I can't remember the last time I was wrong."

I pointed at #12 on her math homework. "Well, that one's wrong."

"Damn."

I took her pencil and fixed the problem.

"So do you think you're actually....interested in Marco?" Cassie asked. "As in, dating-wise? Boyfriend material?"

I groaned at the thought of Marco as my....boyfriend.

"And what about Tobias?" Cassie continued. "Have you talked to him about any of this?"

I groaned again.

The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch.

"I'll have to think about this one," Cassie said, picking up her stuff.

We both left the cafeteria. I dropped Jake's essay off at his English class and went to Home Ec, where "recent events" had led my least-favorite teacher to realize we needed to do a special, emergency segment on domestic abuse.

I've never been a nail-biter, but I gnawed through an entire right hand's worth just to keep myself seated and silent through that class. I almost tackled her when she said that tomorrow we would be covering "appropriate attire."

Yeah. This from a woman who was wearing a sweatshirt with a big happy cow on the front. I am not even joking.

When the bell rang, I jumped out of my seat and was halfway to the door when I heard it:

"Rachel?"

Oh no. Why me?

I walked back to my teacher's desk.

"Rachel," she said, looking me in the eyes. "I know what happened yesterday, and I just want to let you know that if you feel you cannot work with Marco, it would be totally acceptable for you to work by yourself. Or, you could work with Amanda, our 'single mother'. The school board encourages alternative couples for this project."

Amanda had actually volunteered to work on the project alone because she "likes a challenge." If I worked with her, she would spend the entire week trying to prove she was prettier, smarter, and more athletic than me. Plus, with all the rumors already floating around that I was a) a dominatrix, b) a prostitute, and c) dating/abused by Marco, I really did not need to add "possible lesbian" to the list. Not that was anything wrong with being a lesbian, but I had enough guys fantasizing about me in black leather, thanks to Marco. I didn't need them picturing me getting it on with other girls, too.

"No, that's ok," I said. "I'll stick with Marco."

Her jaw dropped, proving what I had suspected all along: she knew I hated Marco and had paired him with me out of revenge.

I shrugged, and left the classroom. My next class was equally torturous, because I kept waiting for Tobias or Marco or even Jake or Ax to fly past the window and tell me in thoughtspeak that everything had gone well, and everyone was alright, including my little sister.

My last hour, Tobias came.

I was staring at the chalkboard, my eyes glazing over as my older-than-the-Ellimist math teacher mumbled about inverse trig functions. (Rachel,) Tobias said, and I jumped a mile out of my desk.

"Yes, Miss...uh..." Mr. Littleton struggled to remember my name, even though I had had him the year before for geometry. "What do you need?"

(We need you.)

"I need to go to the nurse," I said, gathering up my books.

"Yes...very well..." Mr. Littleton went back to trig as I bolted out of the classroom and to my locker.

I met Cassie in the hall, and we ran out of the school and in the direction of the elementary school--it was only a couple of buildings over.

"What's going on?" I yelled at Tobias.

(We need some elephants.)

I could see flashers up ahead. "What happened?"

(Jake called Animal Control and reported a wild animal attack at the elementary school. Then we, uh, made a wild animal attack. It worked, too: they evacuated the school, so for now most of the kids are safe. But then Animal Control showed up really quick, and Cassie's mom's gotten better with the dart gun since the last time Animal Control showed up to capture us...)

"She took...shooting...lessons. Did...she...shoot anyone?" Cassie panted.

(Marco,) said Tobias, sounding like he was trying to hide his amusement. (In the butt.)

I snorted with laughter despite myself.

(Jake and Ax are trying to keep the Animal Control people away from Marco,) Tobias continued. (I managed to fly away to get you two.)

We were almost at the police cruisers. "Where can we morph?" I asked.

(No one could see you behind that McDonalds.) Not the safest place, but these were desperate times. I ran behind the building, Cassie stumbling after me, and Tobias swooped down and landed on the ground next to us.

(I think I'm going to go elephant, too) he said. I had forgotten that Tobias (and Cassie, too, actually) had an elephant morph from way back when we were trying to prevent the Yeerk infestation of several world leaders.

Tobias and I started morphing to African elephant. We both grew enormous, packing on thousands of pounds under our leathery gray skin. Cassie, however, grew smaller and sprouted black and white fur. The classic get-rid-of-people morph: a skunk.

When our morphs were complete, Tobias and I burst out from behind the McDonald's and charged for the school. Cassie trotted along behind us, trying to stay out of stomping range.

I had to admit, I was pumped. This was what I was good at. Fighting. Not all the messy emotional stuff that had been messing up my life the past couple of days. I needed to do some ass-kicking.

I bellowed my elephant war call and onlookers jumped out of the way of the sudden elephant stampede. The police jumped out of the way, too, actually. They weren't stupid. Cassie's mom, however, stood her ground with the dart gun. Until Cassie snuck up unnoticed thanks to the chaos Tobias and I were creating and sprayed her mom right in the face.

(You guys owe me,) Cassie said to Marco, Jake and Ax. Well, Jake and Ax. Marco was unconscious. (I have to live with her, you know.)

Jake was in his lion morph, and Ax was a cheetah. They were trying to stand ground around Marco, who was in gorilla morph and taking a nap on the pavement between them. He had a bright red tranquilizer dart sticking out of his left buttcheek.

I grabbed Marco with my trunk and hoisted his heavy ass onto my back as Cassie and Tobias held the crowd back. I couldn't help thinking that Tobias just wasn't using the elephant more to its full potential. He was too timid, too..._delicate_ almost.

I stampeded through the crowd (again, they were all smart enough to jump out of my way...however, a police cruiser did suffer some major damage). "Awesome elephants!" I heard a familiar voice yell out. I turned to see my sister Sara jumping up and down from the large group of kids that had been evacuated from the school and pushed off to the side.

(Your sister's kind of scary,) Jake said. He let out the eardrum-splitting tiger roar. Sara squealed with glee and jumped higher.

Ax raced ahead of me. (We need to find a place to demorph.)

I turned around. There was a definite crowd following after us, and I couldn't run fast enough to lose them because I was afraid Marco would slip off my back.

(I think we've found our solution,) Jake said. I looked ahead. There was a kid our age standing in the street right in front of us, totally unafraid of the pack of wild animals headed his way. Erek King.

"Hey guys," he said with a wave. "I heard there was an animal attack going on...need some help?"

The crowd following after us sure got a shock. Erek put a huge hologram around us, making us disappear. Tobias grabbed him with his trunk, put him on his back, and we hauled ass out of there. Once we'd gotten a decent distance away, we all demorphed and remorphed to birds and Erek took the hologram off.

"See you guys later," he called out to us as we flew off for Cassie's barn.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Just so everyone knows, I was curious about whether or not Rachel could have actually lifted Marco with her elephant trunk, so I googled it. Male elephants can lift around 600 pounds. Male gorillas weight between 300-500 pounds. Go me! Now show me you all appreciate my (relatively) super-fast reviews by hitting that review button!


	24. Let's Talk About Sex

Disclaimer—

I had a review recently that made me decide to write this. I just want to let everyone know, that this story was never meant to be any sort of continuation or even companion to the books. I consider it to be AU—it takes place in an alternate universe, one where the Animorphs behave like normal teenagers, instead of teenagers trapped inside a children's book series.

Please don't bother telling me "But not _all _teenagers swear and have sex!" Yes, I am aware. However, I was 16 once, and so I am basing these things very much on my own experiences (if Marco seems a little girly in chapter 22…that would be why. I had to go to a very lesbian place to write that chapter. And, it was an ok place to visit, but I personally would not want to live there.) Anyway, I write the Animorphs I always wanted to read. Probably if I had finished writing this story the year I started it (when I was 14 and still at a Christian school…yikes that was a long time ago) it would probably not have as much sexual stuff, but I'm 19 now and past the point where that's all embarrassing/taboo to me. However, if I wrote it all when I was 14, it would probably have a lot more swearing…that was the year I discovered profanity.

Getting to my point: this story is going to have swearing. Probably a lot of it. Also, this story is a romance. Granted, I could be more vague and leave things to the imagination, but I feel like that's taking the easy way out. I'm trying to write the type of story that I would want to read (in case anyone's interested in writing one for me…that would be a comedy/romance, Rachel/Marco but in a believable way, because any good Animorphs' fan knows Rachel wouldn't just fall in love with Marco, she'd have to be dragged into it, kicking and screaming…anyone want to get started writing one of those?)

This story is going to have more swearing, and the sexual stuff will probably get worse (or better, depending on your opinion. This story _is_ rated teen for a reason. If anyone thinks it should get bumped to a more mature rating, let me know and I'll consider it.


	25. Triangulated

**Jake**

"Dude..."

"Marco?"

"_Dude_..."

"Marco, what are you trying to tell me?"

"Dude, I..."

"If you call me 'dude' one more time, I'll kill you."

"Ok," Marco took a deep breath. "Jake, _buddy_, I've got to tell you something."

"Well, spit it out soon, I've got plans with Cassie."

"Yeah," Marco rolled his eyes. "_Plans._ Figures. Anyway, I've got to tell you something, and you have to promise that you won't tell anyone. And that you won't kill me."

"What? Why would I kill you? Marco, just tell me what...oh my god! Cassie! _Did you do anything with Cassie?_" I yelled, despite myself.

"Uh, no," Marco said, looking at me like I was nuts. Which I possibly was, actually, but he just had this absolutely guilty look on his face like he had...

Wait.

"_Rachel?!_" I exclaimed, finally getting it.

"Shhh!!" Marco hissed. "You CANNOT! TELL! ANYONE!"

"Woah, dude," I said. Marco glared at me. "I wouldn't be worrying about _me_ killing you."

Marco looked up in the rafters nervously. We were in Cassie's barn, after our meeting where we went over the situation concerning the elementary school. We'd pulled the tranquilizer dart out of Marco's butt, but he'd still slept through most of the meeting, where we'd come to the conclusion that we needed to do something more permanent to keep the Yeerks away from the elementary school. Unfortunately, the only one with an idea was Rachel, who wanted to blow the building up.

Needless to say, we were still exploring other options.

Anyway, after everyone had left, I stayed with Marco to wait for him to wake up. Luckily, he didn't get too close to the two hour time limit before he groggily demorphed and I explained to him what had gone on during his nap.

That was when he'd informed me that we needed to talk.

"How did this happen?" I asked Marco. He launched into a long-winded story about Rachel coming to his room in the middle of the night and more or less pouncing on him. I cut him off when he started describing a topless Rachel in _way_ too much detail, considering she was my cousin.

"Are you making this up?" I asked him suspiciously.

Marco laughed. "Jake, if I'm making this up, Crayak can strike me dead right now and Tobias can dance on my grave."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it only yesterday Rachel attacked you in the school hallway and gave you a bloody nose?"

"I never said she's stopped being violent."

"So there _is_ an abusive relationship going on."

"I don't know _what's_ going on actually," Marco admitted with a shrug.

"Yeah...you guys didn't....uh....you know?" I asked.

"No," Marco said. "I kind of think, though, if my dad hadn't come in..."

"Your dad?"

Marco explained the interruption. I nodded sympathetically. "I know how you feel. This one time, Tom walked in on me and Cassie. I couldn't look at him for weeks. I almost would have rather had him catch me morphing."

Marco laughed. "Wait," Marco said when he stopped laughing. "Tom walked in on you and Cassie having sex?"

"Well...yeah," I admitted.

"NOOOOOOOO!!!!!" Marco howled.

"What?!" I exclaimed, startled by the horrified look on his face.

"I didn't realize you and Cassie had actually done it!" Marco moaned.

"So?" I asked, still confused. "What's the big deal?"

"_I'm the only virgin!_"

"Is that all?" I asked, and rolled my eyes. "No, you're not--" I stopped. Considered Tobias's reaction yesterday to Marco wearing Rachel's black leather ensemble. "Well...I mean, Ax, probably..."

"Aliens don't count."

"Oh. Well, then, I guess...I mean, there's nothing wrong with it..."

"Nothing wrong with it?" Marco exclaimed. "Sure, there's technically nothing 'wrong' with being a virgin at 16. Unless every single other person you know _isn't_."

"It's really not a big deal," I told him patiently.

"Oh really?" He asked me. "How long ago did you and Cassie start doing it?"

"That's not important."

"_Jake._"

"Ok, like a year ago. But seriously Marco, you've never even had a girlfriend."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

I shrugged. "What I mean is, you just haven't had the opportunity. It's not like you'd really have time to date some girl from school, and I'm with Cassie, and Tobias and Rachel..."

Marco raised his eyebrows at me.

"Well, up until now you and Tobias weren't sharing Rachel."

"Hey!"

"So really, there's never been anyone for you. Unless there's something I don't know about you and Ax..."

"Ax is way too much alien for me to handle," Marco said.

"Right. So like I said...you just haven't really had the opportunity."

Marco sighed. "I guess you're right. So...what do you think I should do? About Rachel?"

I considered it. "Personally, I wouldn't care if you dated Rachel. Especially if it would make you two get along a little better. But with Tobias...I can see it becoming a huge issue. Whatever you end up doing, I just want you to make sure that the three of you can still all work together."

Marco sat down on a bale of hay. "If Tobias tried to kill me, he'd get in trouble, right?"

I sat down next to him. "Do you think that's really a possibility? You and Rachel?"

Marco shrugged. "Ten hours ago, I would have definitely said no. Right now, though, I'm a big believer in anything is possible."

I nodded in agreement. You kind of have to believe anything is possible when you're a teenager that can turn into a cockroach.

"Hey guys," Cassie said, walking into the barn. Marco jumped up guiltily.

"Uh, hey Cassie," Marco said. "You know, I was just about to get going, so I should probably...go." Cassie and I watched him speed-morph into an osprey and take off.

I looked at Cassie. "You know, don't you?" I asked her.

"About Marco and Rachel? Hours ago."

I nodded. "How do you think that's going to turn out?"

Cassie grabbed a rake and started mucking out a stall. I picked up another rake to help her. "Well, either Rachel is just having some sort of fling with Marco and is going to end it soon and break Marco's heart, or she's really interested in him and sooner or later she's going to have to break Tobias's heart."

"So not good?"

"Not good," Cassie agreed. "Either way. But...I think, best case, she ends it with Marco and Tobias never finds out."

I stopped mucking. "That's best case?"

Cassie stopped working, too. "Yeah. I think Marco would bounce back much easier than Tobias. I think, if Tobias loses Rachel...we might lose Tobias."

That was a little more serious than I had been expecting. I had pictured awkward silences, and maybe a fist fight (talon fight?) to break up. "I think you're wrong," I admitted to Cassie. "I think Tobias is tougher than that. If he could handle being trapped as a bird, he can handle getting dumped."

Cassie smiled. "I hope you're right," she said. "I really do. But triangles never turn out good. Didn't you watch season one of _Dawson's Creek_?"

"Of course I saw season--uh, I mean, no. Of course not. That show is for girls."

Cassie rolled her eyes.

"Ok, fine, I loved _Dawson's Creek_. Are you happy? But I'm still confused. Is Marco Joey or Jen in that scenario?"

"Jen. I mean, neither. That's not the point!" Cassie scolded me. "The point is, triangles never end well."

"Don't you think it's much closer to the Gunn-Fred-Wesley triangle on _Angel_?" I asked.

Cassie considered. "Yeah, I guess I could see that since they both liked her in the beginning, but Gunn dated her first and then Wesley swooped..." Cassie stopped and shook her head. "Wait, what am I doing? That is not the point!"

"Or maybe the Oz-Willow-Xander thing..."

"No, because that was a double triangle with Cordelia-Xander-Willow...damn it, Jake, stop trying to suck me into this conversation!"

"Sorry, Cassie. I'll stop, I promise....Wait! I've got it! Ray-Neela-Gallant on _ER_!"

"What about Greene-Corday-Romano?"

"Let's hope not, both those guys died. Besides, I'm not sure that counts as a triangle, because Romano and Corday never hooked up. And I'm still not convinced she liked him at all."

"You know it was there. Read between the lines a little. Any woman could see it. Kovac-Abby-Carter?"

"Again, which one would be Marco and which would be Tobias?"

"Obviously Tobias would be Kovac, because she dated him first."

"Yeah, but Carter didn't steal her, Kovac dumped her."

"Brian-Justin-Violin Guy on _Queer as Folk_ ?"

"Cassie?"

"Yeah?"

"I love you."

I have seriously found the perfect girlfriend.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Haha, I know that's probably way more TV than Jake and Cassie have time for, but I am a TV-junkie and I had to throw in some references to that. I was crushed when Romano died on ER, especially since the whole thing with him and Corday never happened 

Sorry this one took a little longer. I ran into a wall for a little bit there. The name "Triangulated" comes from a song by Imogen Heap called "Loose Ends". I listen to it a lot when I'm trying to think of inspiration for this story. In fact, here's my _Your Basic Nightmare_ playlist:

_Head Over Feet_, Alannis Morisette

_Faded_, Soul Decision

_Loose Ends_, Imogen Heap

_Thnks Fr Th Mmrs_, Fall Out Boy

_I'd Do Anything_, Simple Plan

_Wonderwall_, Oasis (although, in all honesty, this song can be applied to almost any relationship story)

Listen to it and enjoy.


	26. It's Complicated

Marco

After I left Cassie's, I went the only place that made sense to me: Rachel's house.

I thought about doing things the normal way, and demorphing and knocking on her front door, but I figured her family wouldn't exactly be welcoming me warmly, since they thought that I had beat her up at school. Instead, I landed on her window ledge and tapped on the window with my beak.

Rachel was sitting on her bedroom floor, painting her toenails a dark blue. She stood up to open her window. "Hey," she said as I hopped in and started to demorph.

"Hi," I said as soon as I was human again. "So…what have you been up to?" I asked, trying to pretend that things weren't awkward.

Rachel shrugged. "You know, just celebrating being a girl in the 21st century again. I'll probably give myself a facial next."

"Speaking of facials, did you happen to give me one while you were in my body? Because my skin has felt really smooth ever since I got it back."

"There may have been a mud mask."

"I knew it."

Rachel and I sat down on her bedroom floor and she went back to painting her toes. "Marco, I know things got kind of weird the other night…"

That was an understatement. Kind of weird would have been if Rachel had complimented me on my bedroom décor. My vocabulary was not expansive enough to come up with the words to fully describe how weird Rachel taking her shirt off solely for my viewing pleasure had been.

"Look, Rachel," I cut her off. "I think we both know that whatever is going to happen next is up to you."

Rachel didn't look up from her toes. "Yeah. I know."

"And?"

"I'm not sure."

I wondered if it was obvious that I was trying to cover up sounding too hopeful by sounding annoyed. "What does that mean?"

"Trust me, Marco, I would love to be able to say that I never want you to touch me again, but-"

"Waaaaaaaaaaahn. Waaaaaaaaaaaaahn."

THUD!

That was the noise Baby Think-it-Through made when I grabbed her by the foot and swung her into Rachel's bedroom wall.

"Damn it, Marco!" Rachel said as she jumped up to rescue Mildred. "That is definitely going to get our grade marked down for child abuse!"

"I really hate that thing."

Rachel checked to make sure that Mildred's head was still attached and fed her a bottle before she sat back down next to me.

"What I was trying to say," she continued. "Is that I don't know what I'm doing."

"Well, if you ever figure it out, I would really like to be informed." Why was it easier to try and be an asshole than to be understanding?

Rachel started to repair the damage to her polish that she had done when she jumped up to help Mildred. She still wasn't looking at me. "Marco, I _love_ Tobias. I really do. Do you know even know what that is like, to be in love with someone?"

_Maybe_, I thought, but instead I said, "Well, then how do you explain what happened with us?"

"I guess things get confusing when someone jumps in front of a bullet for you."

I nodded. "Remind me to never do that again."

Rachel smiled and finally looked up from her painting. "You're a dumbass, you know?"

"I know."

There was a long pause where Rachel went back to her toes and I fidgeted and tried to resist the urge to bite my own nails.

"I want to pretend that it never happened," Rachel said after what felt like an hour.

"Which part?"

"All of it. You never took that bullet, we never switched bodies, and nothing happened between us." Rachel sounded hard again, more like the tough Rachel I knew. The Rachel that hated me.

My stomach sank. "So that's it?"

"Yeah. We fight Yeerks together, and that's all. You're too short and you annoy me."

"Well, you're not so great yourself, you—"

Rachel stopped me before I had a chance to start listing her (nonexistent) flaws. She stopped me by grabbing me and kissing me again. This time everything was faster, harder, almost more desperate. I know I was holding her more tightly, moving things quicker, in case this really was the last time.

Rachel had pushed me back so I was lying on her floor next to her bed and she was on top of me. My hands were tangled in her long blond hair, and her arms were around my neck, holding us together. I was so lost in kissing her that I didn't even here the tap on the window, I just felt Rachel stiffen and knew that something was wrong.

"Shit!" She whispered, and I knew instantly what it was. Tobias. At the window.

"Can he see us from there?" I whispered to her. The way the room was positioned, I though the bed we were next to might be shielding us from view.

"I don't think so," she whispered back. I slid out from under her and squeezed under the bed. Rachel stood up. I could see her legs as she walked over to the window. I could have morphed into something smaller so I could be more comfortable in the small space under her bed, but I wanted to stay human to make sure that I could hear everything.

"Nothing, just painting my nails," Rachel said. Because Tobias was still in his hawk body and talking in private thought speak, I could only hear her half of the conversation.

"Yeah, my sister is really excited that she doesn't have school tomorrow."

"We really need a plan to deal with the elementary school," Tobias said in his human voice. I could see his feet now—he had morphed to human. "But I really wanted to talk to you about something…"

All of a sudden, it seemed like a very bad idea to be under Rachel's bed, listening to this conversation.

"You've been acting a little strange lately," Tobias continued. "I've barely seen you. Is something going on?"

Rachel sat down on her bed, and Tobias sat next to her. "No. What would be going on?" Rachel asked calmly.

"I haven't seen you," Tobias repeated.

"Well, I didn't think you would want to see much of me when I was trapped in Marco's body," Rachel said with a laugh.

"I always want to see you."

Great. Now I was starting to feel bad for Tobias. Not like he and I have ever been best friends, but he had an awful life even before he was trapped as a bird. And I'm the guy trying to steal his girlfriend.

"I'm sorry," Rachel said. "I was embarrassed. I was a boy!"

I could hear them shifting on the bed and could tell Rachel was moving closer to Tobias. Wonderful. They were cuddling right above me.

"You haven't even told me what happened when you were trapped at the Revolutionary War with Marco."

"That's because it's not important," Rachel murmured. More shifting on the bed above me. They were definitely lying down now. "I just want to forget about the whole thing."

"Did Marco do something to you?" Tobias asked.

I heard Rachel sit up quickly. "No! Of course not. Why are you asking me that?"

Tobias sat up, too. "You both have been acting so weird. And angry. You seemed so angry at him…"

"You know how annoying Marco has always been. How would you like to be sent back in time with him?"

"Rachel, I see the way he looks at you."

Note to self: Learn how to be more subtle.

"So Marco has a tiny little crush. What does it matter? I love you, Tobias. Let's just forget about Marco."

How could she forget about me when she knew I was trapped under her bed? There was no way I was going to risk even morphing to a cockroach and trying to escape—too possible that Tobias would see me.

Rachel and Tobias lay down again, and I could hear that they were kissing, although much slower and less forcefully than Rachel and I had been. I decided that if they started having sex on the bed above me, I would just climb out from under the bed, tell Tobias the whole story, and just let him kill me rather than have to listen to that.

"I'm sorry if I was being paranoid," Tobias said. "But I couldn't lose you."

"I know," Rachel whispered. Maybe I only imagined that she sounded sad when she said it.

Rachel moved over to the side of the bed and stood up. I could see her feet and the nail polish that had somehow turned out perfect on her toes. "Let's go for a walk," she told Tobias. "I need some fresh air."

That was my cue to leave. As soon as Rachel and Tobias left her bedroom, I morphed back to an osprey and flew out the window. As I left her house, I saw them walking down the street, holding hands.

And I had thought my life was complicated when I only had to battle an alien species.


	27. We Give It Up and Walk Away

Rachel

My heart was pounding frantically in my chest the entire time Tobias was in my bedroom. I knew Marco could hear every word we were saying, every time we moved on my bed. As soon as Tobias seemed convinced that there was nothing strange going on, I moved him out the door as quickly as possible.

We didn't talk much as we walked down the street holding hands. Tobias and I have always been kind of quiet like that—we can usually tell what the other person is thinking without having to say too much. I hoped he couldn't tell what I was thinking about today, because it all revolved around Marco and what had just happened in my bedroom.

How had I become the girl with my boyfriend on top of my bed, and the guy I was cheating on him with hiding under it?

When I was talking with Marco in my room, I decided that we had to stop. I had to end the entire thing. I even told this to Marco. But for some reason, my decision only lasted about 30 seconds before we were kissing on my floor.

Kissing Marco is so different from kissing Tobias. With Tobias, everything is so slow and caring, and I feel how much he loves me and needs me. But with Marco, things are harder, more desperate, more passionate, and I can feel how much he wants me.

Tobias squeezed my hand and I smiled at him. This was it. This was how it was supposed to be. I had known it all along, but I had just been confused for a minute. Obviously I was just missing some passion between me and Tobias. I had known this for a while—it had led to the purchasing of the now infamous leather outfit, in fact. But the solution was definitely not to fool around on the side with _Marco_ of all people.

So that was that.

"You look upset," Tobias said.

I tried to smile more convincingly. "No," I said. "I was just thinking about school. I have a lot of homework that I should be doing."

"Sorry," Tobias said. He let go of my hand so he could wrap his arm around my waist and pull me closer to him. "Let's go back to your house. I'll let you finish your homework."

We walked back to my house and up to my bedroom. Tobias kissed me good bye, and when we kissed he did this thing I love where he puts his hands on my neck underneath my hair and rubs my neck gently. I started to melt and tried to make the kiss deeper, but Tobias pulled away.

"Do your homework," he smiled at me. "I'll come see you again tomorrow."

When Tobias left, I dragged out the trig homework I had and started plowing through it. Sometimes I actually like math homework. It can be tedious and sometimes confusing, but there is an undeniable satisfaction to working through a tough problem, and then checking the back of the book and discovering you found the right answer. Math is comforting in its logic and certainty. There are rules that cannot be broken or even bent.

After about half an hour of trig and twenty minutes spent typing an absolute travesty of a summary on the chapter of _To Kill a Mockingbird_ that I had read for English, my mom knocked on my bedroom door and interrupted me in the middle of my work on the baby log that was supposed to be Marco's job (but that I didn't really believe that he would do right).

"Yeah?" I called through my still-closed door.

My mom came in. "Rachel, I got a call from your school saying that you ditched your last two periods."

"Oh." My mom had, I assumed, been getting regular calls like this from the school for the last three years. I had no idea why she was choosing today to crack down on her parenting skills.

My mom sat down on my bed, right where Tobias had been sitting two hours ago. "Did you skip school to hang out with that boy?"

"What boy?" I asked.

"Rachel, cut the bullshit," My mom said. Sometimes it sucks to have a lawyer for a mother. Playing dumb never works. "You know exactly who I am talking about. Your cousin Jake's friend. You may remember that he was responsible for giving you a bloody nose only yesterday."

"Right. Him. No, Mom, I did not skip school to hang out with Marco. They guy who gave me a bloody nose yesterday."

My mother folded her arms across her chest. "Then where were you?"

There was only one answer. "I was at the mall. They were having a sale at Forever 21."

My mom looked around my bedroom. "I don't see any shopping bags."

"I already put everything away. Can we please skip the cross examination?"

My mom stood up, walked over to me, and put one of her hands on my shoulder. "Rachel, I'm just worried about you."

I turned back to the baby log. "You don't need to be."

"Your first therapy session is after school tomorrow."

"I know, Mom."

My mom started walking out of my room, but she stopped at the door and turned to look back at me. "I know we don't get to spend a lot of time together. But I hope you know that you can talk to me if you need to."

"I thought that's what the therapist was for."

My mom left. I tried to shrug it off, but I felt bad. She was worried about me. Unfortunately, I could never explain to her what was going on—with me, with my love life, with my epic battle against aliens. Sarcastic comments were easier than trying to confide without giving away any of my secrets.

My phone rang, making me realize that I had been staring at my computer screen for fifteen minutes thinking about everything. I answered it quickly. "Hello?"

"Rachel?" It was Marco.

"Yeah, this is Rachel," I said. I had been hoping he wouldn't call me and that we could just leave it at what I had said earlier. And that we could forget about the part where, immediately after telling him that I wasn't interested, I had started kissing him again.

"I just wanted to know how Mildred is doing," Marco said. "You know, I really think that she is starting to grow on me. I might even miss her when she is gone. Only four very long days from now."

"Look, Marco, I want to clear something up. I meant what I said earlier. I am with Tobias. You and I are just stuck doing this Baby Think-It-Through project together, and that's it." I fiddled with the pencil I had used to do my math homework. Did I sound firm enough? Or was I being too mean? I squared my shoulders. I should be meaner. That would make things easier. "I messed up. I don't know _what_ the hell was wrong with me."

Marco was silent.

"I don't want you hitting on me or making any of your comments anymore," I continued. "It's embarrassing. Everyone notices. I need you to _leave me alone_."

Marco finally spoke. "I called to ask about the baby log. I want to get started on it, but I needed some information from you."

I couldn't read his voice at all. He sounded like regular Marco. Had I hurt him? Did I care? I needed to avoid hurting Tobias, and if I had to hurt Marco to avoid that….then that was how it had to be.

"Yeah, I already got started on that," I said. "I can email it to you so you can work on it."

"Don't bother, my internet is out right now," Marco sighed. "Never mind, I can just do it tomorrow."

I spun my desk chair around. "No, I can bring it to you right now. I have it on a flash drive."

"Don't worry about it, I can get it tomorrow—"

I was already out of my desk chair and slipping into my ballet flats. "Let me bring it over. I really need a walk. I'll be there in 10 minutes."

I hung up the phone and ran down the stairs and out the front door. I yelled over my shoulder to my sister Jordan that I was running to our cousin Jake's house to work on a project for school and I would be back soon.

It had just started to get dark and the air had just the right amount of coolness in it. I walked fast, because I knew that if I slowed down and thought about what I was doing, it would sink in that it was not a good idea for me to be going to Marco's house. I had the flash drive in my hand, but it was a flimsy excuse at best. I was going to Marco for a different reason, although I wasn't totally sure if I wanted to kiss him or beat the crap out of him.

I stopped when I got to his front door. On a scale of 1 to 10, how unhappy would his dad and stepmom be to see me on their doorstep? Screw it. I rang the doorbell.

"_I got it!_" I heard Marco yelling through the door. He flung it open. "Dad, Jake's here, and we're going for a walk!" Marco yelled as he shut the door behind him, grabbed me by the arm and started dragging me off his porch. He continued dragging me at a fast pace until we were several houses away. Obviously Marco thought they would be pretty close to a 10 on the unhappiness scale.

"Here's the flash drive," I shoved my excuse into his hand. He put it into his pocket and we continued walking in silence.

"You know," I said after we had been walking for a few minutes. "I don't even like you."

"You walked all the way to my house just to tell me that?"

Evidently. "Yeah. I wanted to make it clear."

Marco shoved his hands into his pockets. "Well, then that really sucks for me. Because I happen to like you a lot. And if you don't even like me, then you're being a real asshole by messing around with me."

Angry Marco was much better than Hurt Marco. "I know. I was curious, and now…now I am not curious anymore. I was just messing around. I didn't realize that you would take it so seriously."

Marco grabbed my arm. "Look, Rachel, if you are doing this out of some twisted effort to make things easier for me, you can cut it out. If you want to pick Tobias, just tell me. I can handle it. I can understand."

I stepped in front of Marco so that I was looking him in the eyes. "Marco, get it into your tiny little brain. I am not interested in you. We kissed a couple of times, and it was kind of fun—_and I will deny that under oath, so don't bother repeating it to anyone_—but that's it. I'm not picking Tobias, because there was never any contest."

Marco nodded. "Yeah. Okay," he said. He turned away from me. "I'm going to go home now."

As I watched him walk away from me, I realized that I had no idea whether I had been lying or not.


	28. We're Overrated Anyway

Marco

Getting up bright and early for my appointment with the therapist my dad had arranged for me to see during my "break" from school did nothing to improve my mood the morning after Rachel told me she had no real interest in me and had only been using me because of my incredible sex appeal. Or at least that was how I chose to interpret it.

"So tell me about the girl," Dr. Jameson said, taking out her notepad and pencil.

I had no idea why my dad had chosen a woman therapist. I shifted in my chair. What are you supposed to do with your hands while talking to a therapist? I tried folding them and putting them on my lap, but I was fidgeting and tapping them on the armrest again within a minute.

"What girl?" I asked. Dr. Jameson looked like one of those school teachers that you knew not to mess with.

She smiled at me. "The girl that you had the issue with at school. What's her name?"

_Her name is __The Last Fucking Thing I Want to Talk About__. _"Rachel."

"How do you know Rachel?"

_Fighting alien invaders together_. _The usual_. "Well, we've always gone to school together. And she's my best friend's cousin. And her best friend is dating my best friend." _And she's dating this bird that I watch TV with sometimes_.

"Have you always been interested in her romantically?"

"No." And the good news is, now I am no longer interested in her at all. Because it is entirely her fault that I have to be in therapy talking about her the morning after she broke my heart into tiny little pieces. Again.

"When would you say you began to notice her romantically?"

It was getting harder to plan my answers over the mantra of _I hate her, I hate her, I hate her _that was running through my head_. _"Look, this is really unnecessary. There is nothing going on between me and Rachel. She has a boyfriend." I threw that last part out there like having a boyfriend was the same thing as having a steel chastity belt.

"Marco, therapy is not going to help you if you are resisting the process," Dr. Jameson said with a smile.

I sighed and snuck a glance at the clock hanging on the wall behind Dr. Jameson's desk. There were still 35 minutes left in my session.

Dr. Jameson studied me with a look that felt more probing than the questions she was asking. "I would like to understand your relationship with Rachel."

I snorted. "That makes two of us."

Dr. Jameson raised her eyebrows slightly. "Would you like to elaborate on that?"

"Not really."

"Can you tell me why you hit her?"

"No. I absolutely cannot answer that question." Dr. Jameson made a note on her clipboard. Therapy was going to get old very fast if she was going to spend the entire two weeks asking me why I hit Rachel. Particularly because it had never happened. Now, if she wanted to ask me about why I had let myself be shot and killed for Rachel, I might have been on board. That was a question I would like to have answered myself.

"Marco, I would like you to describe Rachel to me, starting with her physical appearance."

I paused for a minute to try and figure out if it was a trick question before I answered. "She has blond hair, blue eyes. She thinks she's taller than me, but we're actually the same height. Sort of. She's thin." I listed the most basic of descriptions.

"What's her personality like?"

"She's kind of a bitch." I blurted out.

Note on the clipboard. Damn it. "Really? How so?"

"Well, she wants everyone to think that she's so tough…and she is, she's really strong, but she wants everyone to think that nothing ever gets to her."

"Why do you say that she is strong?"

"You know, she can handle a lot…"

"Can you give me an example?"

For some reason, a normal teenage problem never even occurred to me. Not that I really remember anymore what normal teenage problems are. Zits? Is that it? Instead, I was thinking about David. David was this kid that we temporarily used the blue box on to make another Animorph. Long story short, he went rogue on us, almost ruined several missions, tried to kill Tobias, Jake, and Ax, and basically became an all-around huge threat to our existence.

Cassie was the one that actually came up with the solution to dealing with David. We didn't want to kill him, although in retrospect, it might have been the kinder alternative. Instead we trapped him as a nothlit—a rat, to be exact. David will live out the rest of his life as a rat. If he's even still alive. I did some research on rats, and many rats in the wild only live about a year, due to the high number of predators they have. We trapped David over two years ago.

In order for us to trap David as a rat, someone had to stay with him past the two hour time limit to make sure he didn't escape. It ended up being Rachel and Ax. They volunteered to do it so that the rest of could maybe sleep a little better at night without David's screams for mercy in our heads. Ax is an alien cadet, trained to be a warrior, and I assume trained to handle that kind of thing. But Rachel was born a warrior. She has some kind of strength that the rest of us don't. I hated David, and I don't know if I could have done what she did.

And even though I wouldn't go so far as to say that she was unaffected by it, she has been the best of all of us at pretending to still be a normal teenager. Her grades are a hell of a lot better than mine anyway. She has to be sacrificing the few precious hours of sleep that we get in order to do homework, and yet she always looks fresh and awake and….

"Marco?"

I snapped back to attention. "Uh, sorry. What did you ask me?" I asked Dr. Jameson.

"Let's try a different question. How do you feel about Rachel?"

Shit. "Well…um…what do you mean?"

Dr. Jameson picked her pencil up in preparation. "You've said there is nothing going on between you and Rachel. But you admit that you have known her for years. It seems like she is more than just an acquaintance. So how _do_ you feel about her? Do you view her as a friend? A potential romantic interest? Or do you dislike her?"

I definitely disliked the question. But somehow I didn't think that would be accepted as an answer.

I considered my answer. How _did_ I feel about Rachel?

On one hand, I had taken a bullet for her. I had chosen to die rather than watch her suffer. But it had been a split-second decision. More of a reflex. Could I really be sure that I wouldn't have done the same thing for Jake or Cassie or even a total stranger?

And, to be fair, she had dumped me. Well, I guess she didn't really even dump me because in order to be dumped, I always assumed you needed to be dating. Anyway, dumped isn't a strong enough word. Crushed is more accurate. She crushed me.

Plus, she likes to punch me a lot.

And it would be easier. It would all be _so much_ easier. Maybe I could even feel less guilty about the whole thing—it is one thing to be temporarily seduced by blond hair and an amazing body when it is coming right at you, it is something completely different to be actively pursuing a girl when her boyfriend is, supposedly, one of your friends. Particularly when you only have five friends. And one is an alien.

Rachel was done. She made sure to tell me that to my face.

So I could be done. I could let this all go and make myself feel nothing for her. Maybe I had never even felt anything to begin with.

Tobias could be happy. Rachel could be happy. And I could be…indifferent. Indifferent sounded good for now.

I looked up at Dr. Jameson. "She's just a girl," I said. "She's just some pretty girl."

After therapy was over, being suspended wasn't so bad. My dad was probably supposed to make it into more of a punishment, but my dad and my stepmom both work days. So I went to the mall.

I was in the food court, eating a bean burrito, when I heard a guy behind me that sounded like he was really enjoying his Cinnabon. Like, _really_ enjoying it.

"Mmmmmmhhhhmmmm! I love Cinnabons. Bons. Bonnnnnnnz. Yes! It is so amazing in my mouth! Mouth-thuh. Yes! Yes! Such an explosion of pleasure in my mouth!"

Shit. That could only be one person.

I turned around slowly in my chair. Sure, enough, there was Ax, in his human morph, tearing into an unsuspecting (but I hope consenting) Cinnabon while making X-rated moans. If I had to label it, I would go with "cinnagasm". Tobias was slumped forward, resting his head on his hands, with a look of complete and utter defeat.

I gathered up the wrapper from my burrito and slowly stood up, hoping I could slip away before they noticed me, when…

"Marco! Marco, it is I, Aximili! Marco, you must come share in the pleasure of my Cinnabon!"

I practically ran over to Ax and Tobias's table, only to make Ax stop shouting my name and inviting me to join him in his pleasure. I crashed into the chair next to Tobias, hoping it would be easier than looking him in the face.

"Aren't you guys supposed to be watching the elementary school?" I asked.

"No need," Tobias said. "The school is closed until Monday while they try to make sure there are no more wile animals running around. And the Yeerk pool entrances are already constructed and ready to go, so there is nothing going on."

"So basically we managed to stop them until Monday," I said with a sigh.

Ax had finished the majority of his Cinnabon and was now licking the extra frosting directly out of the cup. So he chose not to join in on the conversation.

"Unless someone comes up with a plan…I'm not sure what we can do," Tobias said. "Ax hacked into the city records and checked out the blueprints for the building. If they put the Yeerk pool entrances where we assume that they did, then there is no way to destroy the entrances without destroying the entire elementary school."

"And Jake is still against blowing up the elementary school?"

"As far as I know. I hear that you can go to jail if you get caught for that kind of thing."

Obviously no human jail could hold an Animorph. But it could blow our covers as "Andalite Bandits" if local teenagers were caught destroying a building with a brand-new Yeerk pool entrance. And that is the kind of story that they like to run on the local news channels.

"Hey, Marco?" Tobias said.

I played it cool. "Yeah?"

"That leather outfit thing the other day? Not cool."

I laughed weakly. "Oh, yeah. That. You're right, that was not cool. I will definitely not do that the next time that I'm trapped in Rachel's body."

Tobias raised his eyebrows.

"Which hopefully is never." I added. "Because, you know, Rachel…yuck. Gross."

Tobias did not look impressed.

"I mean, not yuck. Yum! NO, _not_ yum! I mean…"

Tobias was looking more and more like he wished he was in his hawk body so he could tear me to shreds with his talons. Or at the very least, poop on my head.

I sighed. "I think I should just stop talking now."

"I think that would be best." Tobias agreed.

"YUMMM! Yes! Cinnabon!"


	29. You Get What You Give

I want to start out this new chapter by letting everyone know that I am a huge review whore. HUGE. Yeah, I said it. Reviews are the reason that I have kept trying to finish this story for over eight years now. So for those of you that have been reviewing—I really appreciate it!

Also, just so I don't look like a hypocrite, I have started making sure that I (honestly) review EVERY story that I read. It is harder than it sounds. But I have been spreading out the good juju and hoping it comes back to me. I hope everyone knows that even a very short review can make someone's day—it definitely does for me!

-Catty

Rachel

"So tell me about the boy," Dr. Jameson said. She was sitting in a small forest green arm chair, with her notepad on her lap and her pencil ready to go. She had a desk too, but I guess she was sitting in the arm chair to make me feel more comfortable.

It was my first appointment with the therapist that the school had arranged for me to see. I had only been there for five minutes and I already hated the therapist. No particular reason, I just hated being asked all of these questions. Although so far it was just one question. I knew more were coming.

I chose to ignore the question that Dr. Jameson had actually asked. "I have a boyfriend named Tobias." I answered instead.

"And Tobias was the boy you had the altercation with at school?"

"No," I admitted.

Dr. Jameson smiled. If I didn't know better, I would swear that she was enjoying this. "And what is the name of the boy that you were fighting with?"

I sighed. "His name is Marco."

"And what is your relationship with Marco?"

I opened my mouth to answer and was surprised when nothing came out.

"Is that a difficult question for you?" Dr. Jameson asked. She wrote something on her notepad.

"No. It is not difficult," I said. "Marco and I are friends. Sort of. We actually don't know each other that well."

"Is that so?" Dr. Jameson asked. "How do you know him?"

"From school. And he is my cousin's best friend. And his best friend is dating my best friend." I answered honestly before I realized it made me sound like a liar.

Sure enough, Dr. Jameson said, "It sounds like you must have spent a lot of time around each other. How long have you known each other?"

"I'm not sure. A while," I answered before I realized that I couldn't even remember the first time I met Marco. I had known him even before kindergarten, because he had been Jake's best friend since diapers practically. I couldn't remember a time when Marco hadn't been around. I had known him even before I met Cassie.

In fact, Jake, Marco, and I had spent quite a bit of time together in elementary and early middle school. Even though Cassie and I met and became best friends in 3rd grade, she didn't live in our neighborhood and missed out on a lot of after school playtime.

Back then, it had often been Marco and I teaming up to get Jake to do crazier things. One time, when we were 8 or 9, Marco and I got this stupid idea to ride our bikes down one of those catwalks that has the super steep and winding walkways to get up and down. It was one thing that we could not convince Jake to do with us, so we did it without him. Marco ended up with a broken wrist, I scraped most of the skin off my right calf, and Jake was smug for months.

I'm not sure why that memory was stuck in my head. Or why I kept wondering…if Tobias had been there with 8 year old me, would he have hopped on his bike or watched from the sidelines?

And which was better?

"I guess he's always been around," I finally said. "But…you know how you don't notice people when they've always been there?"

"Yes. Yes I do," Dr. Jameson answered. I didn't like the way she insisted on keeping eye contact with me. It made me feel like I was being interrogated. Which I guess I was. I focused on the armrest of her chair instead, so I could avoid her gaze.

"Rachel, I would like for you to share with me a memory you have about Marco."

My head snapped back up so that I was looking at Dr. Jameson again. "Excuse me?"

"It can be anything you like," Dr. Jameson continued. "Just tell me about a moment that you have had with Marco some time in your life. It doesn't have to be significant. I want to understand how you two interact."

I chewed on my bottom lip. A memory about Marco. Lots of things came to mind. The story about the catwalk was one. But most of my memories of Marco had to do with his mom. And they weren't exactly memories that I could share with Dr. Jameson.

See, Marco's mom (or at least her body) is Visser One. The most powerful and deadly Yeerk that we have ever known. For years, Marco thought his mom was dead. His dad still does. But in reality she is a Controller. For a while we had thought she might be dead, mostly because of us. Marco had made that call. But for now she is still alive, and still a slave. Marco made that call, too.

But even if I could tell Dr. Jameson about that stuff, I wouldn't have chosen any of those memories. Because then Dr. Jameson might figure out how much I admired Marco for some of the choices he had made—choices that I wasn't sure if I would have been able to make, if it had been my parents or my sisters.

I needed a boring story that would give Dr. Jameson the impression that I had no interesting relationship with Marco. That he was just a neighborhood guy that I hadn't spent much time around.

Before I could think too hard about it, I started telling her the first non-Animorphs, non-cheating-on-Tobias story that came to mind.

"I went to this party once," I began, and I instantly regretted my choice of story, but it was too late. It was already spilling out. My secret Marco story, the one not even Cassie knew about.

"This girl at my school—she's a cheerleader or something, I think—was having this big party at her house one weekend. And for some reason she invited me. I helped her out with her math homework once, so maybe she was trying to be nice. Anyway, none of my friends were going, and I didn't think any of them even knew about it. I don't know why, but I decided to go by myself." That last part was a lie. I did actually know why I decided to go by myself.

We've all been changed by the war a little bit, and I know a lot of people worry about me the most. They worry that I enjoy the war too much. Maybe I do. And maybe sometimes I worry about me too. That was why I decided to go to the party. I wanted to prove to myself that I could be a normal teenager. I wanted to prove that I could have a good time without fighting anyone. Without even thinking about the Animorphs, which is why I didn't bring along Cassie or Tobias.

"So I show up at the party, and I don't really know anyone. I was wandering around by myself for a little while. A couple of guys asked me to dance, but I wasn't interested. I thought about drinking something, but it seemed lame to sit in a corner and drink by myself. And then…I saw Marco."

Dr. Jameson was taking notes on her notepad, but I could still feel her watching me. I refused to look at her, and instead I studied the spines of the books on the bookshelf next to me.

"What did you do?" Dr. Jameson asked me after a long pause.

"I went over and said hi," In reality, Marco and I had stared at each other awkwardly for a few moments as we realized what we both had done. We had both tried to ditch the Animorphs for one night—and look how it had turned out. We'd laughed about it.

"And then?"

"We started hanging out…and we were drinking a little." That was an understatement. We had hit the booze table and Marco had grabbed an entire bottle of Bacardi rum. We had started out drinking it with Coke, but soon we were both taking straight shots.

"What's 'a little'?" Dr. Jameson asked me with a smile. Clearly the woman was used to dealing with teenagers.

"Ok, maybe it was a lot," I admitted with a wince. It was a painful memory. I had somehow let Marco goad me into a drinking contest.

"What were you doing while you were drinking?"

I was pretty sure that at some point there had been a dance off, but there was no reason that Dr. Jameson or anyone else ever needed to know about _that_. "We were just talking."

"What did you talk about?"

I chewed on my bottom lip as I considered my answer. This was getting a little too personal—I needed to make sure I wasn't letting anything incriminating slip out. Although the funny thing was, now that I thought back on it, I couldn't remember Marco and I talking about anything Yeerk-related.

Marco had started out by pouring us drinks. "Jake would kill us if he found out about this," he said.

"Yeah, well," I took a healthy swig from my cup. This was at the point when there was still Coke mixed in with the rum, but it was a very strong drink. "I'm 16, not 35."

"Right," Marco nodded as he began to gulp down his own drink. "We are young, hear us roar! We should do something wild and crazy. Like have sex under the pool table."

I rolled my eyes. "There is not enough alcohol in the world to make that happen."

"I beg to differ. That was a very well-stocked card-table-passing-as-a-bar."

"You get drunk and try to hit on one of the other girls here, and I will stay mostly sober so I can observe the moment and remember it in the future whenever I need a good laugh."

Marco grinned. "Is fearless Rachel afraid to get waaaaaasted? Have I finally discovered mighty Xena's weakness?"

I knew that he was messing with me, but I couldn't stop myself. "Bullshit! I can drink you under the table! But not the pool table," I added, when Marco started to leer.

And that was the beginning of the drinking contest. Things get a little fuzzy after that, but the next thing I remember clearly, Marco and I were in a completely different room of the house. Definitely a bedroom. We were sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed with the bottle of Bacardi between us.

"So…you and Tobias. What's up with that?" Marco asked.

"Excuse me?"

"Don't give me that look, Xena. Obviously I know that he is the Mickey to your Minnie and all that."

"Then what are you asking me?" I was getting pissed, but the room was spinning a little too fast for me to do anything about it. Like hit Marco.

Marco took another drink, this time straight from the bottle. "Explain it to me. The connection. Cause I am totally not understanding how Wonder Woman ends up with Robin. Bird reference totally intended."

"I'm not a comic expert, but have those two even met?" I took the bottle from Marco and drank from it myself, assuming that the alcohol would kill the Marco germs.

Marco turned so that he was looking at me. "You are avoiding the question."

"Give me one reason why I should answer it."

I stopped telling my story at this point, because I remembered exactly what it was that Marco had said to me that had made me shove the story way back in my head where I could almost forget about it.

Dr. Jameson put down her notepad after we had been sitting in silence for a few minutes. "Are you having trouble continuing, Rachel?"

So many years of lying to everyone about everything, and yet I could not think of an alternative way to finish my story.

"No. I'm not having a problem."

"Then what happened next?"

What had happened next was that Marco had gotten really serious. Apparently Marco was a serious drunk. Or maybe not, considering the dance off. But either way, Marco had been very serious when he said to me, "Because you don't seem happy."

I opened my mouth to object, but Marco cut me off. "No, wait, listen to me, Rachel. I have seen both of you every day for the past three years, so I think I know what I am talking about. I see the two of you, and you both have this determination, like you have decided to be together, and that is just how it is going to be. No matter what.

"And I know both of you really well, and you have so little in common. You are this amazing war goddess, and you are smart and funny and interesting and you don't take shit from anyone. And you like fashion and shopping and TV. And Tobias?"

Marco didn't have to finish. We both knew where it was going. Tobias was my calming side, which was good. I needed someone to calm me down sometimes. But no matter what Jake or Cassie worry about, after this war, I always see myself being normal again. Or at least as normal as possible. I want to finish school and watch TV and go shopping and eat McDonald's.

Tobias is different. For a long time I thought that Tobias was choosing to remain in the fight instead of becoming a human permanently. I could respect that decision. As much as I wanted a fully human boyfriend, I also really wanted Earth to not be taken over Yeerks. But I also wonder (worry?) that Tobias is just refusing to give up being a hawk.

I wonder if Tobias will ever choose to be human again.

Of course, I didn't tell Dr. Jameson this part. Instead, I jumped to what Marco had said next, thanks to _in vino veritas: _"You and Tobias don't make sense."

I insult Marco a lot. We argue a lot. But when it gets down to it, he is one of only 5 people in the entire world that really knows me. If anyone every asked, I would say that Cassie knows me the best. Followed by Tobias or Jake.

But Marco and I are a lot alike. We both spend a lot less time wrapped up in the ethics of the war. We are the more brutal Animorphs. Marco, Ax, and I are often the ones that are dedicated to harming the Yeerks and actually winning the war—while Jake and Cassie try to keep us alive without killing our souls.

And Tobias? I don't know if this is Tobias's war anymore.

My point is, when Marco said that, it cut through me. Right to where I keep all of my own doubts about my relationship with Tobias. Because it is one thing to have doubts. It is another thing to hear someone else say them out loud. And that was when I knew that Marco was actually the one that got me—maybe even more than Cassie.

"I love Tobias," I said, aware that I was gripping the bottle of rum way too hard. I took another drink.

Marco nodded. "I love Jake," he said. "He's my best friend. But that doesn't mean we should be dating."

I looked up from the Bacardi so that I was making eye contact with Marco, and that's when I knew two things for sure: 1) Marco was telling the absolute truth about his opinion of me and Tobias, and 2) He was thinking about kissing me.

This made my head spin even faster. It also gave me a fluttering feeling in my stomach that I decided to believe was caused by the alcohol.

"Rachel…" Marco began after a period of silence.

"No," I said. I stood up. Shakily. "Fuck you, Marco." I threw the glass bottle into the bedroom wall, and it shattered, splashing us both with rum. I stumbled out of the party then and never looked back to see if Marco tried to follow me. I went behind some trees outside to morph to an owl and fly home. When I demorphed back to human, I was completely sober.

I told all of this to Dr. Jameson, except the part about morphing home and becoming sober again. And the stuff that made it sound like we are in the middle of a war for planet Earth.

"How long ago did this happen?" Dr. Jameson asked me.

"I think it was about two months."

"How did you interact with Marco after that?"

"I don't know," I shrugged. "The same I guess. I kind of wanted to forget about it. I figured that he was only thinking about kissing me because…you know, drunk. But just in case, I acted a little meaner towards him. But I really just wanted to forget the whole thing."

"And your fight in the hallway was the first major interaction that you have said since this party?"

I folded my arms across my chest and sunk low in my chair. "Not exactly," I admitted.

"Would you like to tell me more about that?"

"No," I snarled. I had definitely done enough sharing for the day.

"Alright," Dr. Jameson agreed. She stood up and sat her notebook down on her desk. "I think that this is probably enough for today. I will see you soon, Rachel."


	30. I Don't Think You Think You Need Me

Marco

"AAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!"

That was the sound a Hork-Bajir made when I picked him up and threw him into the kindergarten class craft table.

It was Friday night. I was in gorilla morph. Our newest attempt at destroying the new elementary school Yeerk pool entrance. The plan, simple enough, had been to go in hard and fast, tear up some Hork-Bajir, and do as much damage as possible while the kids weren't around.

Apparently the Yeerks had had an idea that we might be trying something like this. They had set up guards for the weekend. Lots and lots of guards.

I wasn't sure how many we were outnumbered by, but it was not looking good.

Cassie, in wolf morph, ran past me, vaulted off the teacher's desk, and sank her teeth into the throat of another Hork-Bajir.

Cassie and I had managed to get ourselves cornered in the kindergarten room. It was the two of us against six Hork-Bajir. And more could come in at any time.

Two Hork-Bajir came at me, wrist and elbow blades flashing!

I grabbed a metal filing cabinet that was covered in alphabet magnets and swung it at the nearest Hork-Bajir. He went down, but I wasn't fast enough to get the second one. He sunk his elbow blade deep into my shoulder, cutting through muscle and tendons and scraping against bone.

(AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!) I yelled in thoughtspeak.

(MARCO!) Cassie cried.

I grabbed the Hork-Bajir's head. Nicked my hands on some of the blades, but managed to get a good grip. I yanked my hand, and heard his neck snap.

Hork-Bajir, when they are not infested by Yeerks, are incredibly sweet creatures, despite their deadly appearance. It never feels good to have to kill them. Unfortunately, sometimes it is kill or be killed.

I pulled the Hork-Bajir out of my shoulder, and tossed his body aside.

Four of the Hork-Bajir were down. Cassie went after the one closest to her; I took the one by the door. My shoulder was gushing blood, and my left arm was getting weak. I slammed my right fist into the Hork-Bajir's face, and he went down. I turned just in time to see Cassie ripping the throat from the last Hork-Bajir.

I needed to demorph and remorph to repair my injuries, but there was no time. I could still hear the others battling it out, and more Hork-Bajir could be coming. I lumbered after Cassie as she went running out the door of the classroom.

Jake and Ax were in the hallway, fighting at least eight Hork-Bajir. They were moving too fast for me to get an exact count. Cassie ran to join that battle, but despite myself, I was looking for Rachel. My plan to become indifferent was still a work in progress.

FWAAAAAAAPPPP! Ax's tail struck, and the head of a Hork-Bajir came rolling towards me. I kicked it out of my way.

(Where are Rachel and Tobias?) I asked.

Jake, a 600 pound Siberian tiger, leapt on a Hork-Bajir that went down like it had been hit by a truck. Another Hork-Bajir came in behind him. I grabbed the Hork-Bajir and slammed it into a wall of cubbies before it could touch Jake.

(Rachel and Tobias are in the north end of the school,) Ax answered me. I had no idea which way north was, but just then I heard a hawk cry out ahead of me. I went that way. As I moved down the hallway, I had to struggle not to slip in the puddles of spilled blood.

I slid around a corner when my foot hit something soft and squishy—intestines from someone or something. I could finally see Rachel and Tobias.

There were seven Hork-Bajir on Rachel, a grizzly bear. Tobias was his normal self, a red-tailed hawk, which basically meant that Rachel was fighting seven to one, with her pet bird as very weak back up.

Rachel was in even worse shape than I was. Her right arm had been almost entirely hacked off, and was dangling by a small flap of skin and muscle.

(JAKE!) I yelled. (We need help over here!)

(Shut up, Marco!) Rachel growled. (I have everything under control.)

(Bullshit!) I told her as I ran into the fight. (You're down to one arm.) I grabbed the nearest Hork-Bajir by the ankle and swung the seven-foot tall alien into two of his brother Yeerks. Hork-Bajir blade cut through Hork-Bajir flesh, but they were only wounded and far from done fighting.

(Can't help you, Marco,) Jake answered me. (There are more coming in through the cafeteria.)

I mentally ran through every cuss word I knew as I pounded a Hork-Bajir with my good fist. I didn't even realize I had been thought-speaking aloud until Tobias said (Watch your mouth, Marco. This is an elementary school.)

(Oh. Right. Tobias, man, we need some more muscle.) Tobias is good as a hawk. Very good. But we needed more than a bird for this fight.

(I know,) Tobias admitted. (I'll see if I can duck into that classroom while they're not looking. Take care of Rachel while I'm gone.) He added in private thoughtspeak.

(Uh, ok. I will…I will do…_that_.) Great. If Tobias somehow didn't know that I had the hots for his girlfriend before, he definitely did now.

Rachel slammed her shoulder into a pair of Hork-Bajir. One of them went down. The other slashed a blade through her right eye.

I swung a huge, powerful fist at the Hork-Bajir I was fighting. He dodged it, and one of his blades sliced into my stomach.

_Ouch._ Now that hurt. I gasped in pain. I swung my good fist into to the Hork-Bajir's face. He went down, ripping his own arm blade right out of my stomach.

If Tobias didn't get back in the next six seconds, Rachel and I were toast.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Two human controllers armed with guns had come in through the door that led to the playground. A bullet blew past me, just missing my head, and lodged itself into a wall decorated with children's art.

(JAKE! We have to get out of here now!)

I used my weaker arm to try and hold my stomach together, and used the other arm to rip one of those old-fashioned porcelain drinking fountains out of the wall. I heaved it at the two controllers. One managed to dodge it; the other got hit right in the knee.

"AAAHHHHHH!" The controller screamed as he cradled his shattered knee.

BAM! The remaining Controller shot me in the shoulder. The same shoulder that had already been mutilated by a Hork-Bajir.

I was starting to feel dizzy. Not good. I was losing way too much blood. Not to mention that I was pretty sure a lot of my internal organs had been ripped to shreds.

Rachel bellowed. She tried to take down the controller that had shot me, but she wasn't doing so well with only one eye. She ended up just trampling the controller that was already on the ground.

FWAAAAAAP! The controller's gun hand went flying through the air, still wrapped around the gun. Tobias was back, morphed to Andalite. Morphed to Ax, to be exact.

(Oops,) Tobias said. (I didn't mean to take off the whole hand.)

I picked up the gun. Tossed the hand aside. Adjusted my clumsy gorilla fingers, and…

BAM! BAM! BAM! Two Hork-Bajir went down.

(Marco! Tobias! Is there an exit down there?) Jake yelled. (They just keep pouring in over here.)

(There's a door going out to the playground,) I answered. BAM! Another Hork-Bajir down. I figured I owed my aim to hours of playing first person shooter games on Xbox. (Two human controllers came in that way, but I don't think there's anyone else out there.)

(We're coming towards you,) Jake said. (Get ready to head out.)

FWAAAAAP! Tobias took down one of the remaining Hork-Bajir. We were down to only two that were still standing. Rachel had collapsed, and was lying on the tiled floor in a growing pool of blood that was pouring out from her arm stump.

Jake, Ax, and Cassie came skidding around the corner then, looking in about as bad of shape as I felt. Jake was missing the bottom half of his tail, Cassie was gushing blood from her side, and Ax looked like he had been shot. There were five or six Hork-Bajir chasing after them.

BAM! BAM! BAM! Click. Now there were only three Hork-Bajir, but I was out of bullets.

(Rachel! Can you get up?) Cassie asked. (We need to leave, now, before the rest of them catch up with us.)

(I'm fine,) Rachel grumbled. Weakly. She heaved herself onto her three good legs. (Let's go.)

There was one Hork-Bajir guarding the door. The rest were coming from the other direction. FWAAAAP! Tobias struck with his Andalite tail, and then there were no Hork-Bajir guarding the door.

We stumbled out onto the playground, leaking blood everywhere. The Hork-Bajir couldn't follow us. The playground faced a main road.

(The playhouse,) Jake said.

It was big for a playhouse. Wooden. Still, only Rachel and Cassie could fit in at first. They started to demorph, and there was more room. Jake and I squeezed in too. Tobias and Ax stood behind the playhouse at an angle where they were not visible from the road. Tobias demorphed to red-tailed hawk and Ax morphed to Northern Harrier.

Jake, Rachel, Cassie and I ran out of the playhouse as soon as we were fully human. We hopped the chain link fence and ran down the sidewalk towards the busier area of town, where we could get lost in the people.

"Well, that sucked," I muttered as we walked along the sidewalk, mostly silent except for the slapping sound of bare feet on concrete. Even though I was no longer injured, I was exhausted, so tired that I was literally using all of my strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

"Anyone else wondering why they weren't using Dracon beams?" Rachel asked.

"No. I'm too busy wondering how we managed to get out of there alive," I grumbled.

"And how we're going to go back and shut it down for good," Cassie added.

(I am fairly certain that the use of primitive human weapons was to avoid leaving evidence of comparatively advanced Yeerk technology inside your human school,) Ax said helpfully.

We hit a crowd of kids our age then. I hoped that no one from school was around—I looked ridiculous in my tight bike shorts, which would only have been appropriate if I was competing in a triathlon. Plus I was barefoot, and freezing cold.

The crowd separated us into two groups for a few seconds, Cassie and Jake on one side, Rachel and I on the other. Rachel and I walked side by side in silence, but when we came back together, it was obvious that Jake had been whispering to Cassie and had just stopped when he spotted us.

Rachel folded her arms across her chest. "Jake? Do you have something that you would like to share with the rest of us?" she hissed.

Jake sighed. "We don't need to get into it now, Rachel."

"If it was important enough that you needed to share it with Cassie, than I think you can tell me and Marco."

I looked up to the sky, but it was too dark to see Tobias or Ax. Were they still close enough to hear? I had a nagging feeling that, whatever Jake had been whispering to Cassie about, it might not be

in my best interest for Tobias to overhear.

But it turned out that Jake was not the gossipy little girl I had worried he was becoming. "I was telling Cassie that maybe we won't be able to go back," he said, staring straight ahead and avoiding Rachel's face the entire time.

There was silence while we all digested that for a few seconds.

"So, _basically_," Rachel said in a slow, quiet voice. "You are writing off my little sister?"

"We almost got killed in there," Jake shot back. "And I don't even think we slowed them down. They'll mop up the blood and dump the bodies, and the school will be open again on Monday."

"When they will infest my sister, and then it will be _two_ Animorphs trying to sneak around with Yeerks in their houses."

"SHHHHH!" I hissed, elbowing Rachel in the side. She kicked me hard in the shin.

"_Jake_?" Rachel demanded.

Jake moved closer to Rachel. "It's too well guarded," he said. "And it's right in the middle of town. We can only do what we can. You almost died in there, Rachel."

I looked at Cassie to see what she thought. Her eyes were filled, ready to spill over at any moment. "I'm so sorry, Rach," she whispered.

"You too, Cassie?"

Cassie put her hand on Rachel's arm. "You know I love your sisters. And I don't know if we are doing the right thing. When I think about all of those kids…and so many of them have already been captured. But as of right now, we are their only hope of ever being set free. So if we get ourselves killed in a fight that we have no chance of winning..."

Something smelled wrong. No way that Jake could have convinced Cassie to let the Yeerks take an elementary school full of children just by whispering to her for a few minutes. Which meant that he must have talked to her about all of this before.

Which meant that Jake never thought we had a chance to save the school. So, what had tonight been? A pathetic attempt to appease Rachel, who Jake knew would never turn her sister over without a fight?

I locked eyes with Jake. I could tell that he knew exactly what I was thinking.

"We'll vote," Jake said. "We don't decide anything without a vote."

"Let's do it," Rachel nodded. "Now."

"I don't think this is a great time…" Jake began. We had mostly stopped walking, and the four of us were standing in front of closed clothing store. Most people were down by the open restaurants and bars.

"It's a fine time," Rachel snarled. "I'll start. I vote that we find some way to tear the Yeerks apart and shut down the elementary school."

"Fine," Jake said through gritted teeth. "Cassie?"

Cassie wiped her eyes. "I vote no."

"What about you, Jake?" Rachel demanded, hands on her hips.

"It's too big of a risk. I say no," Jake said. "Ax?"

(I agree with Prince Jake,) Ax said, answering my question about whether or not he and Tobias were in hearing range.

"Tobias?"

(I say we go for it,) Tobias said.

"So that's three people against, two for," Jake said. "Marco?"

If I voted with Rachel and Tobias, it would be a tie. I wasn't sure what would happen in the event of a tie.

At that moment, Tobias swooped down and landed on a lamp post. His fierce hawk eyes were staring right at me.

The Marco that hadn't been involved with Rachel would definitely have voted no. There were too many guards in too small of a space. In the elementary school, we didn't have room for our biggest and most powerful morphs. Rachel's grizzly bear could barely move in the crowded halls, which had led to her almost being killed. And we had barely done any damage.

"Marco?" Jake repeated.

Tobias was still staring. Rachel was pointedly _not_ looking at me.

"I vote no," I said.

Rachel slammed her fist into the glass window of the clothing store. The glass shattered, and her fist went through the window. It was bloody when she pulled it back out.

"Rachel!" Jake said. He grabbed her roughly by the shoulder and started to pull her away from the store, Cassie and I trailing behind. "If we come up with a different plan, something that might actually work, we can vote again."

"It will be too late by then," Rachel shoved Jake away from her, leaving a bloody handprint on his tight white t-shirt. "When we started this fight…we did everything we could to save Tom. Everything."

"That was a long time ago," Jake said flatly. "Things are different now. You know that."

"No. No, I _don't_ know that."

Cassie was still crying. I wasn't sure what to do. If I tried to comfort Rachel, everyone would know something was up. And Rachel would probably punch me. If I tried to stick up for Jake, I knew I would end up sticking my foot in my mouth. And Rachel would probably punch me.

"Fuck this." Rachel turned and stomped away into an alley. A few minutes later, I caught a glimpse of a great horned owl rising up into the night sky.

Jake, Cassie, and I stood on the sidewalk in awkward silence.

"She'll get over it," Jake finally said. Unconvincingly.

I was struggling with indecision. Go after Rachel and comfort her. Stay and change Jake's mind. Go after Rachel and convince her to accept Jake's decision.

Go home and try to convince myself that I didn't care.

"Marco?"

Jake looked uncertain. I knew he wanted me to tell him that he was doing the right thing.

I didn't answer him. Even though I had voted with him, even though the numbers said he was right, I still wasn't sure.

But I was pretty sure that I knew what Rachel was going to do.


	31. Pretty Girl with a Wicked Smile On

_Just a couple of things I wanted to say…_

_In case you haven't noticed, I am on this kick where all of my new chapter titles are song titles or lyrics. There were a couple from the song _Loose Ends_ by Imogen Heap, then one by the New Radicals, _You Get What You Give_, and the past two are from a Matchbox 20 song called _You're So Real_. All three of these songs are on my Your Basic Nightmare playlist._

_In case anyone was wondering, this story takes place in a very narrow time frame, between book #42 and #45. This is because it is after the second Helmacron visit, but before Marco rescues his mom and fakes his own death._

_The ending is finally in sight! It's still a ways off, but I can actually see myself finishing this story! With that said, the ending is definitely going to be a love-it-or-hate-it type thing. By that I mean that I will love it, and everyone else will probably hate it._

_I am a huge pop culture junkie and my stories are full of pop culture references. However, I basically never try and put those references into the timeframe of Animorphs. In my mind, this story is taking place in present day…except without cell phones. Trust me, it is much funnier that way._

_**Pretty Girl with a Wicked Smile On**_

Rachel

Later, it would actually surprise me how quickly I made my decision.

It wasn't something that I should have decided lightly. I could definitely be killed. Or kill myself, since, it turns out, science is not exactly my best subject. And I haven't even taken chemistry.

Not to mention I was breaking several major laws. If I was caught…well, I just wouldn't get caught. That was all there was to it. To get caught could very well mean death or infestation for me and my friends, because there was no way that Yeerk-infested cops would miss the significance of what I was doing.

And I was going against Jake and the other Animorphs, which opened up a whole bunch of issues. Was I a traitor now? Was I David?

I was making an extreme decision. I was taking myself farther in the direction that everyone worried I was going—more reckless, more violent, more dangerous. But I wasn't doing this because I loved to hurt the Yeerks. I was doing it to save my little sister. Right?

Even with all of these things weighing on me, I had already made my decision. I was taking down that elementary school, no matter what. The Yeerks would not get my sister.

I wanted to smash the school to bits. If there had been a morph large enough, I would have done it myself in an instant. But even my elephant morph wasn't going to take the place down on its own. My original plan was to build a bomb. I've heard that you can find that kind of information on the internet, but when I thought about it, I decided that I really didn't want to build a bomb. Not by myself anyway.

I also considered less explosive options. I knew where I could steal a crane and wrecking ball. The problem with that idea, though, was that cranes move really slowly, and I would need to be driving the thing the entire time in order to do the type of damage I needed. The odds of getting caught or killed while driving the crane were very high.

A bomb was probably the best way to go. All I would need to do was plant it when the school was empty, and make a fast getaway.

Which meant that I was going to need to find someone to build me a bomb.

I considered my options. Ax could do it. But he had voted against me, and I wasn't sure that Ax would go behind Jake's back even if he did agree with me.

Erek King could do it. But it would probably interfere with his Chee programing. Even though I planned to bomb the building while it was "empty", I knew that there were Controllers hanging around in case the "Andalite Bandits" showed up again. There was a definite chance that someone would be killed. Possibly me.

The answer was so obvious that I was embarrassed how long it took me. You see, Ax isn't the only Yeerk-free Andalite on planet Earth.

Not too long ago, the six of us helped out two former Andalite warriors that are living here on Earth. One of them is dying from an Andalite disease, and the other is considered handicap because he can't morph and is missing half his tail. Apparently that's a big deal in Andalite culture. Ask Ax about it some time.

Also, I'm 95% sure that the two Andalites are gay. But I wouldn't ask Ax about that. Because the one time I did, he didn't take it too well. Even though I think it's kind of adorable. But maybe _that's_ why Ax was offended—he might have been appalled at the idea of Andalite warriors being cute.

Anyway, we helped rescue one of the Andalites from the Yeerks. Andalites are big on duty and honor, and they owed us a favor. I wouldn't exactly categorize the two as "friendly", so I was counting on the whole duty and honor thing.

I thought about asking Marco to go with me. I knew Jake would have been able to get the Andalites to do it because they considered him to be a prince, which is also important to Andalites. They wouldn't be thrilled about the idea of a rogue soldier going against her prince. Marco is good at smoothing that kind of thing over, and he had more interaction with the Andalites than I did. But I decided against it. There was no point in dragging anyone else down with me, and I didn't need to be giving anyone (including Marco) the wrong idea.

I also thought about asking Tobias. But I knew Tobias would say yes. Unconditionally, no matter how stupid I was being, Tobias would always say yes. So I couldn't ask Tobias.

Besides, I could do this on my own. I could go in and politely ask two adult Andalite warriors to make a bomb for my possibly traitorous mission. All I had to do was be humble, and maybe grovel a little. Andalites eat that stuff up.

Maybe I couldn't do this.

At sixteen, most people have at least started to think about what they want to do when they grow up. Most of the time, I try to avoid the topic because I don't always believe that I have a future. When I was younger, I wanted to be a gymnast, but I ended up growing too tall even before all of my extra time got sucked into being a superhero. Also, gymnast isn't exactly a lifelong career—I'm 16 now, which means that if I haven't reached my peak yet, it will definitely happen in the next couple of years. Sometimes I picture myself as a teacher, but I'm not sure why. I'm impatient, and I don't like kids. And I definitely don't know what I would have to teach them.

Anyway. Negotiating with Gafinilan didn't get me a bomb. But it did rule out a future career option: politician.

"Arrogant child! You come to me without the support of your prince, asking for weapons? I should kill you where you stand for disturbing us."

I was a little nervous, standing in the living room of the house that Gafinilan and Mertil own as part of the ruse that allows them to live in a suburb without people from _Unsolved Mysteries_ following them around and asking them to explain crop circles. Gafinilan and I were both human, but he probably had a shredder hidden somewhere. Not to mention that his human morph was an adult male.

I would have been more comfortable in my grizzly morph, and I'm sure Gafinilan would have rather been in his own Andalite body. But I was trying to pretend that everything was casual, and Gafinilan was, death threats aside, doing the same.

"It will never be traced back to you," I argued. "No one would ever need to know. Not even Jake. I can get you anything you would need to make it—"

But Gafinilan was already shoving me towards the front door. "If you come here without your prince again, child, I will not be so kind," he hissed at me. I dug my heels into his carpet, refusing to give up without at least a little more of a fight, when I heard a thoughtspeak voice in my head.

Gafinilan.

I ducked out of Gafinilan's grasp. Mertil was standing in the entrance to the underground area where he lives.

Have you forgotten that this is one of the warriors who helped save my life?

I swear Gafinilan rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Mertil, she is a child. A human child."

Like I said, it wasn't my negotiating skills that got me the bomb. Mertil and Gafinilan bickered back and forth like an old married couple for 20 minutes until Mertil suggested that perhaps his life wasn't worth even a primitive explosive device to Gafinilan. After that, Gafinilan threw together the bomb in about half the time he had spent arguing with Mertil, gave me 30 seconds worth of directions on how to blow up a building without blasting myself into a million pieces, and shoved me out the door before I even had a chance to say "Thanks."

Andalites.

As I walked down the street, carrying the bomb in the ugly blue backpack that Gafinilan had put it in, I realized that I hadn't timed the whole thing very well. It was only nine o'clock. My mother knew that I had gone out. Which meant I had two choices—not go home and, if my mother actually noticed, risk that she would freak out and call the cops to report me missing. Or I could go home and wait until my mom fell asleep so I could sneak out.

Call me crazy, but something felt really wrong about going home with a bomb in a backpack. But I didn't know where else I could put it. So I took it home with me.

As I was laying on my bed, wondering how I could be this possibly-insane girl with a bomb in her backpack and my mother and sisters didn't even notice, I realized that my left hand was shaking. Just a tiny bit. Probably nothing to be worried about.

Or was this it? Was I finally over the line into crazy violent psychopath Rachel?

No. If I was a psychopath, I would just morph something huge, go in, and try to stomp everything in my path. I was doing this the smart way. I was planning things out, like…well, like Marco actually. Maybe I picked something up when I spent that time in his body.

Damn it. Marco was the last thing I needed to be thinking about.

"_You are smart and funny and interesting and you don't take shit from anyone. And you like fashion and shopping and TV._"

Fashion and shopping and TV. Not bloodbaths and battle cries. Marco only got it half right.

I want to believe that I have a future after this war. I want to believe, or maybe just pretend to believe, that Tobias and I can have a relationship and jobs and be normal. I want to believe that I can survive without the war.

Marco still believes that I'm that person. Even if he might not be rooting for my future relationship with Tobias.

No. That's not right. There is no future relationship. My relationship with Tobias only works in the present. In the future, if by some miracle the war ends and we are both alive, I will be a human girl and Tobias will still be a red-tailed hawk.

But that's not right either. Am I still a human girl? What will I be after the war?

Marco apparently believes that I can go on and be normal. But maybe he only sees half of me. The half of me he wants to see—the girl that was badass enough to ride her bike down a dangerous curve, but not the girl that can rip a Hork-Bajir to shreds. The girl that sometimes _wants_ to rip a Hork-Bajir to shreds.

I could hear my mom brushing her teeth in her bathroom. She would be going to bed soon. I only needed to wait another half hour or so.

"_You and Tobias don't make sense."_

Marco was wrong. He didn't get it. Tobias sees the other half of me—the warrior. Tobias and I wouldn't be together if I was still just the girl that loved to shop. Tobias and I couldn't be together if I went back to that girl, so it doesn't matter that maybe I can't go back. With Tobias, I don't have to worry about the future because I know there will never be one. Tobias and I can only exist as long as I am Warrior Rachel.

And there's only one real ending for Warrior Rachel.

If I were to be with someone else, then I would need to worry about what I am becoming and what it will mean for me in the future. Not worry. Panic. I would panic about the things that I have done and the things that I sometimes want to do. I would feel the panic so deep in my body that I wouldn't be able to breathe, move, function…

Fight.

I was right to tell Marco no. For Tobias, for myself, for a million reasons.

And for Marco.

I got out of bed and grabbed the backpack. It was time for me to go do the thing that no one else would.

I snuck out the front door of my house, carrying the backpack like it had nothing more than school books inside. I walked the mile and a half to the elementary school. Just an average teenager sneaking out at night. When I reached the school, I didn't hesitate. I had gone to this elementary school. I knew it better than the Yeerks. I circled around to the back, where there was a thicker area of trees. I had played around on a path through the tree area when I was a kid. It was clear enough to walk through, but shaded enough that it would be hard to see me in my dark hoodie and jeans.

I had contemplated ideal morphs for a while when I was lying in bed at home. Anything small enough to be sneaky wouldn't be able to carry the backpack. Anything strong like a grizzly bear didn't have useful hands. I contemplate morphing a Hork-Bajir, but decided that I would have a better chance sneaking in as a 5'8" girl than I would as a seven foot tall alien.

I reached the edge of the wooded area which ended right against the window of my third grade classroom. When I was thirteen or so, middle school but before my run in with Elfangor, I had sneaked into the elementary school through that window. No particular reason. I just wanted to see if I could do it. The window opened easily from the outside. No screen. I had crawled in, walked around the place and then left. If there was an alarm system back then, it hadn't had a problem with my visit. Hopefully I would be that lucky again.

I slid through the window. No problem. The classroom was empty. Probably all of the guards were focused on the cleanup on the other end of the school.

Something shuffled in the corner and I jumped a mile out of my skin.

I noticed the cage in the corner and relaxed. There was a class pet. A bunny.

I couldn't just leave him there to be blown up. I opened the cage and lifted out the rabbit. His soft fur was white and black. I carried him over to the window and tossed him out. I hoped he was smart enough to run for freedom.

I slowly opened the classroom door and peaked out into the hallway. The only light was coming from the glowing red exit signs down the hall. As far as I could see, it was completely deserted.

I needed to get my bomb closer to the other side of the school, where the Yeerk pool entrance was located. It was in the center of the building, in the most protected area.

This was where my plan was getting a little fuzzy. I had to set the timer and somehow get the bomb to that area of the school without being seen. The bomb would need to be hidden so that the Yeerks wouldn't figure out how to disable it before it detonated. I also needed to get myself out of the area fast enough that I wouldn't be blown to bits.

For some reason, I had thought that _getting_ the bomb was going to be the hard part.

I didn't have a plan yet, but I decided to get working and figure things out as I went. That's how I work best.

I set Gafinilan's backpack on the ground and unzipped it. I took out the bomb. It was small and light, much smaller than I had expected. There were wires coming out of it that were attached to part of a digital alarm clock. All I needed to do was attach some wires that Gafinilan had disconnected so the bomb wouldn't detonate early and program in the right amount of time.

I started inspecting the wires to make sure that I was about to plug the right wires into the right parts of the bomb.

That's when I heard it. Footsteps coming from directly behind me. I tensed up. Yeerks. No time to morph. I was done for.

No. That couldn't be right. The footsteps were much lighter than a Hork-Bajir and had to be human, but they had the slapping sound of bare feet on linoleum. Why would a Human-Controller be walking barefoot in the school, without even a flashlight?

I turned around.

Marco was standing in the hallway.


	32. You're in Harm's Way, I'm Right Behind

_**You're in Harm's Way; I'm Right Behind**_

Marco

I've done a lot of stupid things to try and get girls before. Going to a classical music concert was one. Trying to compliment a girl on her body and accidently telling her that she looked like a guy also comes to mind. And then there was an incident involving "manscaping" that I _swear_ I will take to my grave.

But nothing came close to standing barefoot on the cold linoleum floor of the elementary school while Rachel unloaded a bomb from her backpack.

Rachel looked surprised, for obvious reasons. She had no way of knowing that I had followed her all the way to Mertil and Gafinilan's house and waited outside, admiring her guts and wondering if she would even be able to pull it off. She didn't know that I had also followed her back to her house and waited as a bat in her next door neighbor's tree, until she finally came out and I was able to follow her to the elementary school.

She also had no idea whether I was there to help her or stop her. To tell the truth, I wasn't sure myself. Her plan was insane. She was trying to blow up a school. It was the kind of thing that could grant her a starring role on one of those _True Crime_ specials: _Teenagers That Kill _or something. Granted, there weren't any kids in the school, but it was impossible to believe that all the Human-Controllers would escape. Rachel was doing what we had (as far as we knew, anyway) avoided for all of these years: intentionally killing humans.

And she was trying to do it alone. After the rest of us had voted no. After _I _had voted no.

But none of that mattered.

"Let me help you," I said.

Rachel's shoulders stiffened. "I don't need any help. I've got this covered."

I decided not to mention the two Hork-Bajir that had been headed her way as she was playing with the wires of the bomb. They wouldn't be bothering her now anyway.

I should have stayed in my gorilla morph. I was way too exposed as a human.

"You shouldn't do this alone."

"Well, you're the last person that should be helping me."

I snorted. "That's just ridiculous. Everyone knows that I am the evil genius. You may have gotten your fancy bomb all by yourself, but it doesn't look like you have much of a plan to get it close enough to do any damage."

"Evil genius?" Rachel raised her eyebrows but didn't smile.

"Yeah. I am the Giles to your Buffy. You might have the fighting skills, but you need my superior intellect to make sure you don't get yourself hacked to pieces." I regretted the Giles comparison as soon as it was out of my mouth. Sexless father figure, that's me.

Rachel rolled her eyes. "What does your superior intellect know about bombs?"

"They go 'boom'?"

Rachel decided not to dignify that with a response and went back to fiddling with her wires. Maybe she would just detonate the damn thing and put us both out of our awkward misery. I absentmindedly wondered who would play us in the movie version of this if we got caught by normal cops instead of the Yeerks. Obviously they would make a movie. They would pick some blond cheerleader type to play Rachel, probably Hayden Panetierre. Anyone that looks like Rachel would automatically get cast as the bitchy cheerleader in a movie. I think Shia LaBeouf would be good as me, even though we look nothing alike, but with my luck they would probably get Jonah Hill.

"Go home, Marco," Rachel snarled. It wasn't a bad idea. In fact, it was what I had been telling myself all night.

But here I was.

"I can't go home. You need me."

Rachel snorted. "You are the _last_ thing I need."

Rachel might have wanted it to be true. But, for the moment at least, she was wrong. There was only one way she was going to get that bomb farther into the school.

"I'll distract them for you," I spit the words out before I could change my mind. In my head, I kept referring to it as a distraction, but that was really too nice of a word. I wasn't going to be a distraction. I was going to be bait. Things never really work out that well for the bait.

Rachel raised her eyebrows. She was intrigued. "They won't all follow you."

"No," I agreed. "But they will probably only leave a couple of guards behind. You would need to go in and take them out fast—_very_ fast," I corrected. "Then, maybe if you managed to hide the bomb _and_ the bodies…"

Rachel was considering it. So was I—admittedly, I wasn't completely sure that it could be done. It depended on how quick Rachel was, how many guards were left behind, and how bloody the fight was. Even if she managed to hide bodies, a pool of blood would give it away.

"No," she said, shaking her head. Her blond hair shimmered even in the dim light. "Too big of a chance that they would notice and move the bomb or deactivate it. This is my only chance."

"Well—"

"You distract them," Rachel said. "I'll take out the guards, hide the bomb and get out."

"How is that different than what I just said?"

"We don't leave time for them to come back and find the bodies."

I considered this. She had a point. "How long of a window are you thinking about?"

Rachel looked down at the timer on her bomb. "Five minutes."

"No way," I snapped. "There is no way that you could take out the guards and get out of the building that fast."

Rachel shrugged. "It depends on how many guards stay behind."

"You have no way of knowing…"

"Any longer, and they'll have time to send in reinforcements like they did before."

I was trying to do this my way and over-plan every detail, and Rachel was trying to do it her way: jump out of the plane without a parachute and figure out the details on the way down. Meanwhile, we were both standing in the middle of the hallway, basically waiting for the Yeerks to show up and kill us so we could avoid having to make any decisions. We needed to get moving.

"OK," I agreed. "Five minutes." I started to morph to gorilla, but then changed my mind. I was going to be pulling the Yeerks away from the area, which meant I would need to be able to outrun them. I needed something faster than a gorilla. I morphed to a cheetah. I would be sacrificing raw power for speed, but a gorilla can't outrun a Hork-Bajir. End of story.

Rachel programed the bomb for five minutes, but didn't start the countdown just yet. Dark brown fur began sprouting from her face.

When we were both finished morphing, I led the way through the school halls towards the Yeerk pool entrance, Rachel lumbered along behind me in her grizzly morph. She was walking on three legs and awkwardly cradling the bomb in the fourth.

We stopped around the corner from the entrance. So far we hadn't run into any other guards. They were all protecting the most important area. I was starting to get nervous. How many were going to be concentrated into the one area? How many would come after me, and how many would stay behind?

(Hide in that bathroom for now,) I told Rachel. (I'll let you know when to go.)

(I'll start the timer as soon as you tell me.)

I turned to leave. (Marco?)

(Yeah?) I turned back around so I was facing Rachel.

(Thanks for helping me. But this doesn't change anything.) For Rachel, that was close to heartfelt gratitude. She couldn't even say thanks without reminding me that she wasn't interested.

I laughed. (None of that matters, Rachel. If we both manage to survive this, Jake is going to kill us anyway.)

Rachel didn't say anything. I was glad that we were both in morph. I didn't want to overanalyze her expressions, and I didn't want her to read mine.

_Walk away. Just walk away._

(Don't die,) Rachel said finally. And she ducked into the bathroom before I could say anything else.

I headed down the hall. _Don't die._ That would be easy to remember. It was my motto of the past three years, after all.

The cheetah's body was small—only around 140-150 pounds, about the same weight as my human body. But it had more weapons. Teeth. Claws. The liquid grace and lightning-fast reflexes of a cat. And, of course, the speed that had made me choose it.

I darted around the corner. The guards were in the middle of the hall, and there were more than I had expected. Six or seven Hork-Bajir, and two Human-Controllers. I ran for the nearest Hork-Bajir, leapt, and knocked him flat on his back. I sunk my teeth into his throat, felt the blood gush as he squirmed under me.

"GET IT!" One of the humans—a college aged woman with long brown hair—shrieked, but I was gone before they could pull a gun. I took off down the hall. I could hear several of the large Hork-Bajir coming after me. I peeked over my shoulder as I rounded the corner again. Four of them were running after me, along with the woman.

I led them away from the hallway where Rachel was still hiding in the bathroom. I couldn't reach full speed in the short school hallways, but I was still much quicker than the woman and the Hork-Bajir. I was heading for the exit before I realized the flaw. Like earlier in the night, the Hork-Bajir were not going to follow me out of the building. If I left, they would go back, and then Rachel would be doomed.

Shit. _Shitshitshitshitshit._ I was going to have to fight them here in the building for the next 4 ½ minutes, and then duck out at the last second, before the building went down.

If I lived that long.

_Don't die._

I dove through an open door. I was in the cafeteria. It would have to do. The large digital clock read 11:03.

(Rachel,) I said. (Go.)

The Hork-Bajir and the woman ran into the cafeteria after me. I darted around them and knocked the door stop out of the way so that the door slammed shut, hoping that it would block out any sound from Rachel's battle.

The woman was pulling a gun out of her purse. I pounced!

"AAAAAAAHHHH!" She screamed as my claws dug into her shoulders. I opened my mouth and prepared to sink my fangs…

No. I couldn't do it. Instead of going for her throat, I went for her gun hand. The gun went flying across the floor, and I took off across the cafeteria, leaving her behind to cradle her mangled fingers. I leapt up onto one of the tables. Two of the Hork-Bajir were behind me. I crossed the cafeteria by leaping from tabletop to table top as the Hork-Bajir stumbled after me.

I reached the wall on the far side of the cafeteria and ran out of room to run. I cut to the right, jumping over the warming plates the cafeteria workers use to serve food and landing on a stack of milk crates that went crashing to the ground. One of the Hork-Bajir tripped over a milk crate and went crashing head-first into the warming trays. I took the opportunity to use his body as a vault and launch myself right into the face of his buddy.

_Damn!_ One of the shoulder blades sliced into my left back leg. I slashed at the Hork-Bajir's face with my claws until it was a bloody mess.

Suddenly, I was flying through the air! WHAM! My body slammed into the painted cinderblock wall. I slid to the floor where I struggled to catch my breath. One of the other Hork-Bajir had caught up, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, and flung me into the wall.

And he wasn't done. The two Hork-Bajir that I hadn't wounded were coming at me together. I climbed to my feet. This was bad.

"Prepare to die, Andalite." His words triggered Rachel's voice in my head again.

_Don't die, don't die…._

Quick, before even I had time to think about what I was doing, I dove for a Hork-Bajir ankle. I sunk my teeth into muscle and tendons, and kicked my back legs hard into the other Hork-Bajir's ankle. The second Hork-Bajir stumbled, but didn't fall. He grabbed me by my waist and yanked me away from the other Hork-Bajir's ankle. I tore out a mouthful of flesh as he pulled me away.

"MRRYYYYOOOWWW!" I flipped myself like an angry house cat and went crazy on the Hork-Bajir, clawing and tearing like mad at his face.

"AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!" he yelled as I slashed into his eyes. He threw his arms up wildly in panic. His wrist blades sliced into my legs, but I kept scratching with the blinding cheetah speed.

Until I felt the Hork-Bajir get a grip on one of my back legs. I had just enough time to think _uh-oh_ before I was flying through the air.

CRASH! CLANK-CLANG-CLANK! This time, I had gone sailing through the door into the kitchen area and crashed into a wall of pans and industrial-sized pots that went crashing to the ground around and on top of me.

(Fuck,) I groaned. I struggled to my feet, but my left side was in agony. Broken ribs. It hurt to breathe.

That's when I saw it. The gun that the woman Controller had dropped. It had somehow been kicked into the kitchen, probably by one of the huge Hork-Bajir feet. It was useless to me as a cheetah. Unless...

How much time did I have left? I didn't see a clock anywhere. I stumbled over behind some tables and began to demorph as fast as I could. I grabbed the gun as soon as my stubby paws started to grow into fingers.

A Hork-Bajir crashed into the kitchen after me, blood dripping from his face. He threw the table in front of me out of the way, and there I was, completely human and holding the gun. The Hork-Bajir's eyes widened in surprise.

BAM! I shot the Hork-Bajir in the shoulder, but it wasn't enough. He was still standing. He slashed at me with his elbow blade; I scurried backwards, but his blade sliced through the flesh on my chest. I heard the blade scrape against my sternum.

"Aaaaaaaahhh!" I yelled involuntarily. Reflexively, before I even had chance to plan it out, I lifted the gun again and…

BAM! This time, the bullet went straight through the Hork-Bajir's head, and he crumpled into a very large, very bladed pile.

_Morph! _The sensible part of my brain was screaming at me. The other part was starting to panic. How much time had passed? I ran out of the kitchen, my bare feet slipping the Hork-Bajir's blood. The other three Hork-Bajir and the woman were gone. They must have heard Rachel.

The clock said 11:06. I rapidly began morphing to gorilla, stumbling towards the open cafeteria door as I did. (Rachel!) I yelled as soon as I could.

(Get out of here, Marco!) she yelled back, (I'm fine!)

I've known and fought with Rachel more than long enough to recognize the tone in her voice. She was definitely not fine. I bolted down the halls back to where she was planning to plant the bomb, moving at the gorilla's top speed.

Rachel was at the Yeerk pool entrance. There were three crumpled Hork-Bajir bodies on the ground and a human-controller, but she was still fighting four others. The bomb was nowhere in sight, so she must have managed to hide it before the extra Hork-Bajir had shown up. The woman whose hand I had destroyed was gone. Hopefully she had made a run for it.

BAM! BAM! BAM! I used the remaining bullets in the woman's gun, but I was rushed and my aim was bad. I only managed to hit one Hork-Bajir.

(MARCO! I told you to get lost!) Rachel cried. I didn't bother answering her, just went after the Hork-Bajir that was closest to me. I pounded him in the knee with one of my enormous fists and heard the bones shatter, but as he was collapsing, he dug a wrist blade into the right side of my neck. Blood squirted out in alarmingly high spurts.

(We need to get out of here,) I managed to keep my thought speak voice from sounding as panicked as I felt. There couldn't be more than a minute left.

Rachel bellowed and charged into the remaining two Hork-Bajir, sending them crashing into a row of cubbies. That's when I noticed that her entire midsection was sliced open. I could literally see her intestines starting to hang out.

(Let's go,) Rachel said. She turned and began running towards the nearest exit. I lumbered along behind her, but I could feel myself getting weaker rapidly as the blood continued to squirt out of my neck.

Rachel slammed through the exit, which set off a blaringly loud alarm. I followed her out of the school. As soon as we were a few feet away from the building, I started to demorph and I could see her do the same, although we both continued stumbling away from the building as fast as we could even as our bodies changed.

We were both almost completely human and running through the school's baseball field when it happened.

BAAAAAA—BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

We were only a couple hundred feet away from the building. I felt the heat from the explosion hit my back first. Rachel was right in front of me, and I instinctively pushed her down to the ground, then dove on top of her. It occurred to me that she was probably only going to be pissed off at me for trying to save her life yet again.

Debris from the school hit the ground all around us. My face was buried in Rachel's hair, so I could hear but not see the school collapsing. When I was pretty sure that things were done falling from the sky, I rolled off Rachel.

"God, you're heavy," she complained as she climbed to her feet, flipping her blond hair back as if we were chatting at the mall. I grabbed her hand and started to run again, pulling her behind me as I headed for the trees where we could morph and fly our asses out of there.

I never even looked back at the school to see the damage. It didn't really matter to me whether it had been destroyed or not.

There was only one reason that I had gone there in the first place, and I already knew that she was safe.


End file.
